Does VirtualBox VM Have Much A Future Left?

[nanonyme]

Did you try out dosbox instead? It would most likely be faster than virtualbox and folks

[Sonadow]

Did you try out dosbox instead? It would most likely be faster than virtualbox and folks

DosBox is designed primarily for legacy DOS games; it's not meant to be used as a substitute platform for running legacy DOS productivity software. Getting those to work on it is going to be pure luck.

[nanonyme]

DosBox is designed primarily for legacy DOS games; it's not meant to be used as a substitute platform for running legacy DOS productivity software. Getting those to work on it is going to be pure luck.

It's aimed at dos games hence focus is on performance. Speaking of productive apps, I think there was an effort to get win3.11 running on it years back

[SystemCrasher]

Fast compositing for example?

Sure, it is "good to have". But neither it really requred to do most kinds of work, nor it good enough for games. So it sounds like some minor/low priority feature, not something groundbreaking at all.

I wouldn't call it exotic. It makes sense for anyone wishing to play video games on windows through a VM. Right now the only way to do that realistically is to have a second video card, with a second monitor hooked up to that. The only thing I know of that can do it is qemu with KVM.

EDIT: Even then if you have an Intel CPU that had the Virtualization capabilities gimped, you may be SOL.

I doubt it is possible to get reasonable performance this way. Stuff like 3D assumes realy huge data flows where each and every operation counts. Virtualization inherently assumes "extra" operations on the way. Passing whole GPU through PCI-E passthrough is probably least evil in this regard. Also as I can see, quite many people here are just using wine and even bother self with quite advanced techniques like gallium nine.

[GreatEmerald]

It's aimed at dos games hence focus is on performance. Speaking of productive apps, I think there was an effort to get win3.11 running on it years back

"Effort to get win3.11 running"? It runs Windows 95 at the "supported" level:

[Veerappan]

Well, we use VirtualBox + vagrant a lot at work to get developers who are running Windows, Mac, and Linux hosts up and running quickly with the web-based software that we write (based on jboss, java, and apache and Linux server guests)

What used to take several days and be very brittle is now a 20 minute process, and allows installing old versions for support purposes with ease.

Until kvm works on windows and mac (never), we'll be reliant on some other cross-platform virtualization solution.

[airlied]

Qemu doesn't support 3d acceleration (with the exception of vga passthrough), so it isn't a viable alternative. Virgil3d seems pretty dead.

virgil3d isn't dead at all, there are 3 RH devs hacking around the edges of getting it upstream, its just a large project,

https://plus.google.com/104877287288155269055/posts/Uh89CHUyRXr

Its mainly waiting on Gerd in upstream qemu to get the basic virtio-gpu into qemu. The renderer is doing GL3.3 and has been in some ways secured.

then the libvirt/spice integration needs to be finished, Marc-Andre has added UNIX socket support to SPICE to add this on top off.

So lots of little projects need to move forward to get the integrated end product.

maybe Fedora 23.
Dave.

[geearf]

virgil3d isn't dead at all, there are 3 RH devs hacking around the edges of getting it upstream, its just a large project,

https://plus.google.com/104877287288155269055/posts/Uh89CHUyRXr

Its mainly waiting on Gerd in upstream qemu to get the basic virtio-gpu into qemu. The renderer is doing GL3.3 and has been in some ways secured.

then the libvirt/spice integration needs to be finished, Marc-Andre has added UNIX socket support to SPICE to add this on top off.

So lots of little projects need to move forward to get the integrated end product.

maybe Fedora 23.
Dave.

Thank you for your work on this Dave, that looks very cool (especially when passthrough is not an option...)!

[duby229]

virgil3d isn't dead at all, there are 3 RH devs hacking around the edges of getting it upstream, its just a large project,

https://plus.google.com/104877287288155269055/posts/Uh89CHUyRXr

Its mainly waiting on Gerd in upstream qemu to get the basic virtio-gpu into qemu. The renderer is doing GL3.3 and has been in some ways secured.

then the libvirt/spice integration needs to be finished, Marc-Andre has added UNIX socket support to SPICE to add this on top off.

So lots of little projects need to move forward to get the integrated end product.

maybe Fedora 23.
Dave.

Yes, sounds like the future is almost here. I've been waiting for the future since the past. I'm so excited!

[benjamins]

Did you try out dosbox instead? It would most likely be faster than virtualbox and folks

No, currently I've been using the free VMware Player. It's BIOS implementation doesn't have bugs and detects drive errors correctly.