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Review of Sun's Free Open Source Virtual Machine
goombah99 writes "After snapping up virtualization company InnoTek at the beginning of the year, Sun has recently released VirtualBox as a fully functional and highly polished free GPL open source x86 Virtual Machine. It can host 32- or 64-bit Linux, Windows XP Vista and 98, OpenSolaris and DOS. It runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix platforms. The download is just 27MB. A review of it on MacWorld, showing HD movies playing inside windows XP on a mac, demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware. Like its competition, it can run other OSes in rootless, rooted, or seamless modes display modes (where all the applications have their windows mixed at the same time). Each VM instance can only run single core (though I/O is multi-core), and it does not yet support advanced windows graphics libraries however, so some gamers may be disappointed. Slashdot discussed the InnoTek acquisition earlier.
Umm, yeah. Did you get the memo?
In my experience, I've actually found VirtualBox to be much faster than VMware, and coupled with the far less demanding system requirements (at least for the VM software itself, it doesn't do much to reduce guest sys requirements, of course :P), I haven't used VMware for over a year and half now.
Free, GPL AND open source? All in one package? However do they do it?!
The binaries are not Free for corporate use. The source is free (GPL) but good fucking luck compiling it on a windows machine. Maybe you could compile it on a linux machine but on windows it assumes a development environment complete with every freakin' thing under the Sun (no pun intended). I gave up after two days of trying to get it to work.
The weird thing is that the boot time for XP in the virtual machine is shorter than on the real one.
I find this to be an excellent VM that continues to make a lot of progress. After using VMWare server, Bochs, and QEmu, this one really takes the cake on both performance and usability. Virtual machines are easy to set up using a nice graphical interface, and all of the bells and whistles require no extensive configuration (sound, mouse integration). Running a Gentoo hardened Linux on amd64? No problem. Some of the features that really put VirtualBox above the rest for me:
Best of all, it's FOSS.
Sun has consistently appeared to be one of the largest corporate supporters of OSS, and their hardware is rock solid, yet they seem to get bashed every time they come up. It seems like they've been busy giving away the keys to the castle so to speak, but it never seems to be enough. What does everybody have against Sun?
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
"demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware"
what? i have been running vmware on my linux workstation at work for years and recently switched to virtualbox and realized that virtualbox is in orders of magnitude snappier, faster and less ressource-intensive than vmware.
just the fact that mouse support works absolutely flawless in vb is an enormous advantage over vmware. i am not even going into how much i/o wait vmware seemed to cause all the time which vb simply doesn't (yes the settings are comparable:>)
NEVER will i go back to vmware again (at least not on the desktop)
That bussiness model seems pretty fair to me. Release the code GPL, free binaries for non commerical use, and sell the binaries for corporate clients. They are essentially charging companies for the time and expertise it takes to compile it. And presumably it means they only have to offer support to paying corprorate customers.
A nice thing about that model is that it caps the price at the value added. Think sun is charging too much? compile it yourself and support it yourself. The value contained in the code itself, and value added to the code by unpaid GPL contributors, is not part of the price this way.
And that's a very nice way to make money off GPL. You're not cheating the contributors at all. And anyone can go into competition with sun for the compiling. So it comes down to charging for the value added by sun in compiling and servicing it.
Not quite the same as RedHat's model but highly simmilar
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
for benchmark information about virtualbox vs kvm vs vmware workstation, you might be interested in http://dipconsultants.com/press/24508-1/
It's not odd if you look at it from a contribution standpoint.
The FOSS community contributes to VirtualBox directly through help with development, testing and bug fixing on the project, as well as indirectly through their efforts on all the other FOSS projects upon which VirtualBox depends, including toolchains and mountains of utilities. Availability of source code is clearly not optional for this.
Windows binary users get a bit of a free ride on the back of all that hard work, so instead they contribute to VirtualBox by providing a bit of cash. They don't need access to the source code nor a build environment for this, and what's more, in the Windows environment it's very normal and expected to pay for your packages.
So, the VirtualBox product offering seems quite well adjusted to its two communities, and quite fair as well.
True. VirtualBox was GPL2'd in January 2007, Sun acquired InnoTek in February 2008 (source). So it was actually InnoTek, not Sun, who released VirtualBox into the wild in the first place. :-)
I too ran into this problem where I wanted the OSE (Open Source Edition) GPL binaries on Windows. I already had Visual Studio installed, so that wasn't a big deal, but one of the requirements to build is having the MinGW g++ compiler, so now you have a situation where you need two seperate c++ compilers to compile the thing, which is kind of wierd. On top of that you need to download and install the DirectX SDK and the Windows Driver Kit, along with several open source libraries (ok, needing various library dependencies is kind of of par for the course though).
After finally getting everything downloaded and unpacked into a build tree, and getting all the command line arguments for their configure script (so it would know where to find all the libraries), the build process ran for about 1/2 hour then died with a type casting error related to the USB device driver. Now, according to the VirtualBox website, the USB wasn't even supposed to be part of the Open Source Edition (and I suspect that might be part of why I got the errors - because it was expecting it and it wasn't there).
I asked on the VirtualBox forums and developer mailing list, and after a week someone said that they got it to build by commenting out the 2 lines that generated the build error. But now I'm *very afraid*. A Debian developer who 'got rid of build errors' by commenting out 2 very critical lines of source code put hundreds of thousands or millions of users in jeopardy (because of weak SSL keys generated with insufficient randomness). I have no idea what the long term effects of commenting out those two lines of code are, so I wouldn't be comfortable distributing the OSE binaries I built to anyone anyhow.
On that topic - I'm not sure whether *any* binaries built of VirtualBox could legally be distributed under the GPL, anyhow - I'm worried about the fact that it depends on the DirectX SDK and Windows Driver Kit - would the terms of either of those 'poison' the binaries?
I should, I suppose, mention that it's possible that since the version of the source that I downloaded, the VBox developers may have fixed the compile issue, but the whole thing just reeks of trying to appear to be GPL, while making it practically impossible for most users (on Windows, at least) to get it working from source, starting with the fact that you can't compile it on Windows without Visual C++, and continuing on to the un-compilability of the source code version which was released at the time I tried to build the binaries ( about a month ago ).