VirtualBox 6.1 Beta 2 Released As Oracle's Next Virtualization Update Approaches

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VirtualBox 6.1 Beta 2 Released As Oracle's Next Virtualization Update Approaches

Oracle today released their second public beta of the forthcoming VirtualBox 6.1 virtualization software...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=VirtualBox-6.1-Beta-2

[TNZfr]

I hope they solved kernel issues : I can't update VBox 6.0 kernetl modules on a Linux kernel 5.3.x.
Today, I use the last 5.2 available.

[Calinou]

- The VirtualBox 6.1 run-time now supports up to 1024 CPUs.

I get a déjà vu feeling, or well, almost

[schmidtbag]

I get a déjà vu feeling, or well, almost

Replace Flash with "decent GPU acceleration" and this would become completely relevant for Virtualbox lol.

[TheOne]

Replace Flash with "decent GPU acceleration" and this would become completely relevant for Virtualbox lol.

It seems that implementing support for thousands of CPU cores is easier than gpu acceleration

[Terrablit]

I would be a lot more excited about VirtualBox if USB 2.0 (and 3.0, I guess) support wasn't in the Extension pack.
And if the extension pack wasn't being used in Oracle's licensing ambush games. After I saw that happening around Virtualbox 5/6, I removed it from all personal and corporate systems. It's a shame, because Red Hat spent a fair amount of effort fixing up their shitty drivers for inclusion in the kernel.

VirtualBox was nice to have in that you could have easily portable VMs usable on different operating systems. And it kept me from having to use Hyper-V when on Windows. QEMU can also now be compiled with support for using Hyper-V as the hardware accelerator, so it might be a good time for this, anyway. I don't know if those builds work with Libvirt. And I don't know if that makes Virgil usable on Windows hosts.

Still dreaming of a free Hypervisor with solid Vulkan-capable virtualized GPUs that doesn't require certain vendors or dedicated hardware.

[schmidtbag]

VirtualBox was nice to have in that you could have easily portable VMs usable on different operating systems. And it kept me from having to use Hyper-V when on Windows. QEMU can also now be compiled with support for using Hyper-V as the hardware accelerator, so it might be a good time for this, anyway. I don't know if those builds work with Libvirt. And I don't know if that makes Virgil usable on Windows hosts.

Still dreaming of a free Hypervisor with solid Vulkan-capable virtualized GPUs that doesn't require certain vendors or dedicated hardware.

To my understanding, libvirt runs independently of the VM platform you're using, so you should be able to get Hyper-V working regardless of libvirt. Not sure about Virgl.
With virt-manager, QEMU isn't as difficult or tedious to set up as it used to be. A few months ago, I got a Windows guest working with GPU passthrough and all the important ACPI tables. Runs very smooth.
Out of curiosity, does your PC not have 2 GPUs (whether one of them is integrated or not) or room for 2? Because honestly, you might just be better of doing GPU passthrough. I'm glad I did.

[ssokolow]

Out of curiosity, does your PC not have 2 GPUs (whether one of them is integrated or not) or room for 2? Because honestly, you might just be better of doing GPU passthrough. I'm glad I did.

Bear in mind that having two GPUs doesn't necessarily mean having two usable GPUs. I do have an onboard GPU but it's pre-APU AMD, so it gets force-disabled at the BIOS level when a discrete GPU is installed.

(It doesn't even show up in things like lspci and I can't find any BIOS setting to change that.)

[Veerappan]

I believe that 6.1 is also dropping support for the old VBoxVGA driver, and will only retain support for the VBoxSVGA and VMSVGA controller types. Or at least that's what 6.0.* kept nagging me about whenever I booted some of my VMs until I changed the graphics adapter types.

Hopefully they've fixed the graphical corruption issues that I had been previously running into in earlier 6.0 releases.

[Grogan]

I hope they solved kernel issues : I can't update VBox 6.0 kernetl modules on a Linux kernel 5.3.x.
Today, I use the last 5.2 available.

That was a problem with VirtualBox 6.0.12, but it should be fixed now. I used the 6.1Beta for a time because of that, but found I had to downgrade to the 6.0.12 Guest Additions, because the vbox video driver wouldn't unhook properly at shutdown/reboot time on my Windows 7 VM.

However, VirtualBox 6.0.14 is out and the modules compile against Linux 5.3 kernel sources.

I use the Oracle binaries "for all Linux distributions" (VirtualBox-6.0.14-133895-Linux_amd64.run), I can't speak for what distributors/packagers are doing in their repos.