VirtualBox Guest Driver Being Mainlined With Linux 4.16

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VirtualBox Guest Driver Being Mainlined With Linux 4.16

The upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle will be mainlining the VirtualBox Guest "vboxguest" kernel driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.16-vboxguest

[Guest]

Great job!

[Xaero_Vincent]

Is any work being done to get vboxvideo to work with Wayland guests?

[THIRSTY GNOMES]

Could/would VMWare adapt to these drivers?

[MihaiBojescu]

This is great news!

[waxhead]

This makes me wonder what happened with the "VirtualBox kernel driver is tained crap"

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTk5Mw

This is another driver of course, but have all the issues here been sorted out? Does anyone know?

[ryszardzonk]

This makes me wonder what happened with the "VirtualBox kernel driver is tained crap"

Running most recent version of VB on 4.14.11 Gentoo host kernel it says following

[ 2.645176] vboxdrv: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel.
[ 2.646792] vboxdrv: Found 8 processor cores
[ 2.662246] vboxdrv: TSC mode is Invariant, tentative frequency 4007989546 Hz
[ 2.662248] vboxdrv: Successfully loaded version 5.2.4 (interface 0x00290000)

However my experience running windows guests on it is outstanding comparing to vmware where only thing not working for me is nvme driver https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/17228 while on vmware literally nothing worked (disk issues, no 3d accel on intel video, sound crippling, etc...) and officially it has been removed from Gentoo few months back https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-...ht-vmware.html . To install vmware-player 14.0 and corresponding vmware-tools I had to create my own ebuilds as none of the overlays had it. I admit 14.0 was a bit of less crap than 12.8, but still unusable to the point that I did not to even bother post ebuilds for them in the bugzilla.

[Veerappan]

Running most recent version of VB on 4.14.11 Gentoo host kernel it says following

[ 2.645176] vboxdrv: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel.
[ 2.646792] vboxdrv: Found 8 processor cores
[ 2.662246] vboxdrv: TSC mode is Invariant, tentative frequency 4007989546 Hz
[ 2.662248] vboxdrv: Successfully loaded version 5.2.4 (interface 0x00290000)

However my experience running windows guests on it is outstanding comparing to vmware where only thing not working for me is nvme driver https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/17228 while on vmware literally nothing worked (disk issues, no 3d accel on intel video, sound crippling, etc...) and officially it has been nning removed from Gentoo few months back https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-...ht-vmware.html . To install vmware-player 14.0 and corresponding vmware-tools I had to create my own ebuilds as none of the overlays had it. I admit 14.0 was a bit of less crap than 12.8, but still unusable to the point that I did not to even bother post ebuilds for them in the bugzilla.

I was using vbox at work almost daily via both vagrant VMs and a few windows VMs, and then a while back Ubuntu's kernels got reconfigured to only load signed kernel modules in the signed kernel builds which I need (secure boot has to stay enabled on my laptop in order to keep bitlocker enabled in my windows partition). I have to suspect that I'd run into similar issues with VMware.

Over Christmas week, when everyone was out on vacation, I finally took the time to figure out that machine owner keys can't be loaded into my thinkpad's EFI via mokutil, and it was easiest to just give up on virtual box altogether. My Vagrant VMs are all now running in libvirt without issue, and it took about 5 lines of configuration for each project I work on to make the change (porting over cpu/ram settings).

Next up, trying to convert over a windows 7 pro retail install that is still in vbox and will probably break it's validation if I change virtualization providers.

[Terrablit]

This makes me wonder what happened with the "VirtualBox kernel driver is tained crap"

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTk5Mw

This is another driver of course, but have all the issues here been sorted out? Does anyone know?

It's worth noting that there's some significant review and rewrites going on in the mainlining process.Not to mention Hans de Goede has extensive experience with multiple parts of the kernel. so I'm fairly certain that the driver's going to be far better than before. When de Goede was working on the vboxvideo driver, he put it on a massive diet, dropping it from 52k lines to 7k. It seems like Red Hat has made it a goal to make VirtualBox actually work well with Linux, and supposedly Oracle promised not to break it.

[suberimakuri]

Veerappan how are you finding libvirt?
i used to use qemu for juniper, esxi, etc etc.
Vagrant a little with VirtualBox lately and also Docker machine. Libvirt looked interesting but seemed more work and various blog posts unconvincing.
i like the theory of it though!