VirtualBox Development At a Standstill

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.

Comments

Does It Matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Does It Matter?

[TWX]

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.

This is no surprise...

[petergriffinismyhero]

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.

Re:If it ain't broke...

[ihtoit]

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.