Does VirtualBox VM Have Much A Future Left?

[timofonic]

...I think there must be some confusion here, there are definitely more than four of us! I think reports of our death must have been slightly, should I say, exaggerated? I won't go into too any detail, but as one commenter said, take a look at our svn log to see what we are working on. Hope you will enjoy the results!

You are all playing a dirty trick, using a group pseudonym named "vboxsync". This is all corporate obscurity, not a proper Open Source way. This isn't part of the Open Source Community, you are all mercenaries coding for your lords.

And this product is dual licensed, CDDL and GPL. Are you still using that Trojan from the Sun days?

I hope Oracle gets destroyed as soon as possible and a proper Virtualbox alternative appears. KVM looks promising, but needs a more mature SPICE and a GUI that doesn't suck.

[duby229]

I don't think vbox supports GPU passthrough.

EDIT: and also as far as I'm aware, you have to have a second video card to pass through, you can't pass through the video card the host is using. qemu with KVM supports this.

[duby229]

Hmm. How does one accomplish this in VBox?

I don't think vbox supports GPU passthrough.

[elapsed]

Giving you more VRAM won't help you at all. Even if you give the VM 4GB of VRAM, the virtual GPU still lacks the features and the power to run modern games. The only way around this limitation is to pass the videocard through to the VM.

Hmm. How does one accomplish this in VBox?

[MoonMoon]

The only thing I need from VirtualBox is them to lift the dumb VRAM limit.

I want to run Windows in a VM for games, and I'm not really interested in installing WINE. VirtualBox isn't a solution with the VRAM limit. GPUs are coming with 4GB+ of VRAM these days and games are using more and more.

I think the limit was something ridiculous like 256MB. Totally useless and the main reason why I still have to (annoyingly) dual boot Windows, and as a result, spend a lot more time in Windows than I'd like, because of the annoyance of rebooting.

Giving you more VRAM won't help you at all. Even if you give the VM 4GB of VRAM, the virtual GPU still lacks the features and the power to run modern games. The only way around this limitation is to pass the videocard through to the VM.

[curaga]

Nice, I've never seen the 95 beta before. Such a mismash between 3.11 and 95.

[rdnetto]

I've used both VirtualBox and qemu heavily.
VirtualBox definitely has a better GUI, but libvirt is getting better all the time. The only thing it needs is better graphics support, but since libvirt is designed to allow management of the VM from a different computer to the host system, features that would break that model aren't a high priority for them.

The other issue is that the VirtualBox kernel modules are known for their terrible quality - they're the only FOSS modules which taint the kernel

[Xaero_Vincent]

Although the parent poster sure referred to run a separate VM, but on vmware nested virtualization is somewhat possible

This is what I did for amusement.

Heh, nice nesting. I tried out a classic VM guest today too.

[zanny]

I still have all my VMs in Vbox exclusively for the GPU acceleration support. That, and the GTK only UI for KVM is still a cumbersome mess considering you have to manually set up a bunch of permissions. Vbox still has a fantastc Qt interface after all these years.

At the end of the day, if I'm running servers or anything important in a vm, its in a container anyway. I use VMs to test out other distros and show them off to other people (and I used to use them to run Windows, albeit I haven't touched those in over half a year now). That requires GPU acceleration.

I think the next major innovation in this space will be a Gallium backend for GPU paravirtualization. So you can either forward Mesa shaders through a knowledgeable pipe, or share the GPU hardware. Surprised the AMD guys aren't working on it, it seems like it would have a lot of market utility for their business partners driving the FOSS development in the first place.

[andy_v]

usermod -a -G libvirt yourusername

After reboot should work

That's not a universal answer, mind you. For instance, the group is called 'libvirtd' in Ubuntu, IIRC. In Arch, one actually has to create the group first (as it's not created by the package scripts at install time), then add $user to said group and, lastly, create a polkit rule to allow users belonging to said group to manage virtual machines. I think the same procedure applies to Fedora, as I have libvirt installed (along with all the other packages that the "Virtualization" group provides/pulls in), but don't have a 'libvirt' group on my system. Then again, I don't really mind entering root user's password when launching virt-manager as it keeps others from messing with my VMs.