VirtualBox 5.1 Officially Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VirtualBox 5.1 Officially Released

Oracle announced the release this afternoon of VM VirtualBox 5.1...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=VirtualBox-5.1-Released

[chuckula]

Does anybody know if they have gotten seamless display support for Windows 10 guests added back in?
Having to devote a whole virtual desktop to Windows is annoying when seamless support worked better for Windows 7.

[flubba86]

Is this identical to the RC1 from a few days ago?
I know Virtualbox usually takes the last good RC and re-releases it as stable, so I'm guessing it is the same as RC1 unless there was a short RC2 somewhere.

[ruthan]

What about performance and 3D support?, because here VBox sucks a lot..

[flubba86]

There's a couple of really important things to point out in that changelog.

EFI: many improvements, for example allow to boot from USB

This is fantastic news. I have a USB stick with Debian 32bit and 64bit installed on it that I boot into to use at Uni and at workplaces where I need a Linux environment. I use an EFI bootloader on the stick to choose what image to boot into, or to boot the host OS.
Unfortunately the computer labs at Uni have the boot order locked out, so I cannot boot to USB. Instead I use Virtualbox and boot the USB in the VM. I tried forever to get the USB stick to be detected and to boot in EFI mode in the VM, but in the end I had to resort to putting GRUB2 on the stick and run it without EFI.

Linux installers: no longer rely on DKMS for module rebuilding

That one confused me a bit when I manually updated from the ubuntu-supplied 5.0.x version to 5.1RC1. I saw that the old DKMS module was uninstalled, and it didn't install a new DKMS module. I was confused and I couldn't work out how to get the kernel module built. When I opened the GUI to start a VM, it complained that the kernel module was the wrong version. I just rebooted the system and it worked correctly, the init script now builds the kernel module automatically (without DKMS) on boot if it doesn't have one. I now realize I could have simply unloaded the old kernel module (with modprobe -r) and then run the init script myself to get the kernel module built.

[pouar]

is there any reason to stop using dkms? other than "installing dependencies is too hard". Because in Arch, pacman now uses it to automatically recompile modules during upgrades

[franglais125]

I just rebooted the system and it worked correctly, the init script now builds the kernel module automatically (without DKMS) on boot if it doesn't have one. I now realize I could have simply unloaded the old kernel module (with modprobe -r) and then run the init script myself to get the kernel module built.

So... An additional script is run on every boot? If the module is already built, I guess it won't slow the boot process, but if not, then the boot-up is much slower? Did you notice something like that?

[flubba86]

So... An additional script is run on every boot? If the module is already built, I guess it won't slow the boot process, but if not, then the boot-up is much slower? Did you notice something like that?

No, I didn't notice any slowdown at all during boot. In fact, the module may have been built at some other time during the install (again, without DKMS) and simply loaded at boot.

[franglais125]

flubba86 Good to hear, thanks! I guess I'll see how it goes when I upgrade my own VBox.

[michael-vb]

Hello All!

A few answers there:

• The release is not identical to the RC, but it only differs by a few commits.
• We removed DKMS support because it is not supported everywhere. We were already providing nearly the same functionality where it is not supported, and decided there are really better ways we can use our limited developer time than maintaining two kernel module build solutions, and we got quite a few bug reports which turned out to be because DKMS had got confused and stopped working. I don't really care whether it was their fault (if it is maintained at all) or ours, but it was a time drain. DKMS relies on a hook mechanism to be notified when an new kernel is installed so that it can rebuild its modules. We added hooks too, so this should still work. Obviously anything which worked before and does not now is a regression, and merits a bug report if you can reproduce it. If it is not important enough for you to reproduce of course then it may not be important enough to be worth investigating.
• I understand that 3D is an important area for Phoronix readers, but it is not likely to get dramatically better (especially in X11 guests<1>) in the near future. Sorry.
• I am not one of the core virtualisation performance people on the team, but it might still be worth mentioning, other than 3D, any particular and specific performance pain points. Perhaps as particular use cases (or perhaps not).

And other than that, I hope that many people enjoy the new release!

Regards,

Michael

<1> https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/X11Guest3D