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VirtualBox Development At a Standstill

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-with-a-virtual-bang,-but-a-virtual-whimper dept.

jones_supa writes: Phoronix notes how it has been a long time since last hearing of any major innovations or improvements to VirtualBox, the virtual machine software managed by Oracle. This comes while VMware is improving its products on all platforms, and KVM, Xen, Virt-Manager, and related Linux virtualization technologies continue to advance as well. Is there any hope left for a revitalized VirtualBox? It has been said that there are only four paid developers left on the VirtualBox team at the company, which is not enough manpower to significantly advance such a complex piece of software. The v4.3 series has been receiving some maintenance updates during the last two years, but that's about it.

7 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. Does It Matter? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Legitimate question. I like VirtualBox and have used it for a long time, but as the summary said there are good alternatives available which are improving. As far as I know the only real "killer" feature of virtualBox is its OpenGL acceleration, and we'll probably see that in KVM and friends soon enough. Besides that, VirtualBox basically does what it's supposed to do at this point. Even if it stands still, it'll still be useful for awhile (I know I find no compelling reason to switch right now).

    Are there some other core VirtualBox features I'm not aware of that keep people pinned to it? If not, I say let it stagnate and eventually be replaced.

    1. Re:Does It Matter? by TWX · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I only use vbox for local VMs, like when I need to emulate a Windows machine on my Linux box for some Windows-only software that I have to deal with from time to time. I'm not the VM guy at work, but there are lots of virtualized servers running headless on some big blade systems, does vbox do that or is that pretty much out of its scope?

      I agree, for basic workstation stuff it works fine as-is.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    2. Re:Does It Matter? by MachineShedFred · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Parallels really kinda sucks. Of the three major hypervisors available for OS X, it's the worst of them and that's with VirtualBox being stagnant for a year+. No support for OVAs whatsoever. If you virtualize OS X, you can't use keyboard shortcuts without the hypervisor thinking that Cmd+Q was meant for it, rather than an app in the guest OS. And yes, it doesn't do very nice things with thermal management on your hardware.

      VMware Fusion works pretty good, but costs $. VirtualBox, for a time, was actually better than VMware Fusion and free. The guys at VMware have fixed that though.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  2. If it ain't broke... by gabereiser · · Score: 4, Interesting

    don't fix it. I mean sure I'd like more features and stuff, but it works out of the box. No tweaking (other than to guest vm's) or anything necessary. It just works. Sure there are other (paid) alternatives out there but VirtualBox does it's job well for me.

    1. Re:If it ain't broke... by ihtoit · · Score: 5, Interesting

      that will be the point where I'll look for an alternative. As for right now, Virtualbox will, for me:

        - boot a native MS-DOS 6.22 image (forget DOSBOX, if you want DOS functionality use fucking DOS!).
        - boot a native Win32 image with complete Win16 compatibility - just like you got in Win9x. Oh hell, I use win9x when I want that kind of functionality. Virtualbox lets me do that.
        - do the above headless and feed a thin client or six, simultaneously, off a commodity desktop system.
        - let you export a disk image to a partition mounted via the host and thereafter, boot said exported image on a completely different piece of hardware with no further hacking required. I'm looking at you, DOSBOX.
        - let you merge snapshots from specified thin clients into the service image while the image is in use.
        - connect one remote session to another remote session from another server and directly collaborate between the two, migrating clipboard and keyboard events as you go, seamlessly between two completely different desktop environments as if you were hosting them both on the local system. Comes in handy on the odd occasion I'm moving bits of user data (eg user lists) between WAMP stacks that for some reason *have* to reside on the system partition and not the segregated data partition.

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
  3. This is no surprise... by petergriffinismyhero · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Who in their right mind would willingly submit to anything from Oracle? Have you ever been audited by them? Horrible company. They have some great products, but the company itself is a nasty evil entity that thinking people avoid like the plague unless they have absolutely no other choice.

  4. VirtualBox has been excellent, but needs QA by DigitAl56K · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I user VirtualBox all day every day for fairly complex tasks, and it has performed admirably, yet it is sorely in need of QA help. Major releases happen with auto-update notifications and then you realize that your old snapshots can't be started, using a debugger blows up the VM, sometimes snapshots don't save properly even though it looks like they did, etc. etc. Then you have to dig out the last working version, which came out 6 months back, to get up and running again.

    Aside from this "upgrade gamble", which I put squarely on a lack of beta releases, VirtualBox is fantastic. Hardware accelerated graphics with full Aero support, fast virtualization, shared clipboard and files, attaching USB devices - it's everything you need in a friendly UI that anyone can work with.

    It'll be a tragedy IMO if it's left to rot.

    For anyone interested, I find the last stable version to be 4.3.12 (on Windows).