VirtualBox 6.1 Released With Better 3D Support, UI Enhancements

[login]

Any plans for desktop virtualization benchmarks?

Thank you.

[89c51]

I am curious to see when they are going to make it work natively on Wayland. It is Qt based after all.

[Terrablit]

> New 3D support via the VBoxSVGA/VMSVGA code that makes use of the VMware SVGA II virtual adapter and thus the existing Linux Gallium3D/DRM driver code. This is a big step forward with VirtualBox 6 and now the old VirtualBox graphics code is being removed.

It's great that they're removing the old graphics code after Hans de Goede spent so much time mainlining that in the kernel. Seriously, Oracle management and community interaction is such a dumpster fire.

[caligula]

They should've added support for Linux kernel 5.5
I'm using now Virtualbox 6.0.14 on Kubuntu 19.10 and I can upgrade the kernel to 5.5-rc1, but then Virtualbox machine will not start complaining about a kernel module.
Since 5.5 is not supported even in this major version, upgrading Virtualbox to this new version is pointless for my problem.

Heh, so how many distros already ship 5.4/5.5 kernels? Arch?

[polarathene]

Heh, so how many distros already ship 5.4/5.5 kernels? Arch?

I think it was more about how many will next year going forward? Not that it's really practical to claim support for 5.5 if you need to specifically cater support for it to work with your software. I guess we'll see an update/release around that time, before Ubuntu 20.04 LTS arrives? 5.5 will be the next LTS kernel right? or is that 5.4?

[Xaero_Vincent]

So this means VirtualBox should have Direct3D 10.1 support now on Windows guests?

[caligula]

I think it was more about how many will next year going forward? Not that it's really practical to claim support for 5.5 if you need to specifically cater support for it to work with your software. I guess we'll see an update/release around that time, before Ubuntu 20.04 LTS arrives? 5.5 will be the next LTS kernel right? or is that 5.4?

Well, many distros still use 4.x kernels. Not everyone switches to the latest tech as soon as there are upgradeable packages.

[alcalde]

They should've added support for Linux kernel 5.5

Let's be fair here - Linux kernel 5.5 hasn't been released yet. You're using pre-release software; one should only do that if one is willing to risk bugs or incompatibilities.

[alcalde]

I've switched long time ago to libvirt... is there still any reason where VirtualBox offers any advantage?

VirtualBox is possible for a normal human being to use; libvirt is like operating the space shuttle.

[edwaleni]

Any plans for desktop virtualization benchmarks?

Thank you.

Last time (earlier in the year) I ran PTS on 3 Linux hypervisors....

12-25% loss for Virtual Box
9-15% loss for VMWare
2-10% loss for KVM

All dependent on your spin, graphics support, network, blah, blah. Some spins do better in certain areas, some don't. One spin even warned me not to run it in a VM.

The one thing about KVM that I saw was 10GbE passthrough wasn't so hot when only running one guest. Could have been my test setup, who knows, I just noticed it lost more than 50% compared to bare metal. Running Windows in KVM with the virt-io driver set had some issues. The latest release kept losing the mouse. Revert the driver and it came back.

It wasn't as detailed and scientific as Michael's reports but gave me a good set of proportions.