Oracle VirtualBox 5.0.16 Brings More Fixes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oracle VirtualBox 5.0.16 Brings More Fixes

There's not yet any word on the next major release of Oracle's VM VirtualBox software, but at least now available is a new maintenance update...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=VirtualBox-5.0.16-Released

[milkylainen]

I don't get this agenda you seem to have towards VirtualBox. If they don't release like every other week your undertone is that the project is dead, finito, caput etc.
Their previous release was 2,5 months ago. A large project like this may not release every other week to fix trivialities.
Since the 5.0 release they have released on average once every month making 9 releases in as many months if I did the counting somewhat right.

I think everybody seems just spoiled by the Firefox major number scheme which seem to come out every other day to fix their broken shit.
To me, the VirtualBox team seem to be doing just fine. So what if they don't have a master plan with major releases every year set up for the next millennia? I don't care for sure.
When the next release is done, it's done. How about that for a release schedule

[andre30correia]

I don't get this agenda you seem to have towards VirtualBox. If they don't release like every other week your undertone is that the project is dead, finito, caput etc.
Their previous release was 2,5 months ago. A large project like this may not release every other week to fix trivialities.
Since the 5.0 release they have released on average once every month making 9 releases in as many months if I did the counting somewhat right.

I think everybody seems just spoiled by the Firefox major number scheme which seem to come out every other day to fix their broken shit.
To me, the VirtualBox team seem to be doing just fine. So what if they don't have a master plan with major releases every year set up for the next millennia? I don't care for sure.
When the next release is done, it's done. How about that for a release schedule

i agree with you, at least virtualbox works with last kernels, not like vmware shit

[Danny3]

I don't get this agenda you seem to have towards VirtualBox. If they don't release like every other week your undertone is that the project is dead, finito, caput etc.
Their previous release was 2,5 months ago. A large project like this may not release every other week to fix trivialities.
Since the 5.0 release they have released on average once every month making 9 releases in as many months if I did the counting somewhat right.

I think everybody seems just spoiled by the Firefox major number scheme which seem to come out every other day to fix their broken shit.
To me, the VirtualBox team seem to be doing just fine. So what if they don't have a master plan with major releases every year set up for the next millennia? I don't care for sure.
When the next release is done, it's done. How about that for a release schedule

Unfortunately I got the same feeling when I started reading about "There's not yet any word on the next major release".
I find version 5 to be a major release and it doesn't seem to be that old.
I think it just requires bug fixes, which they're doing in every minor release.

I think the idiots from Google broke this normal version increase of Chrome for marketing purpuses, for naive people who think that the higher the version, the better.
I was suprised to see that Mozilla followed the trend with Firefox.
I think in a few years will have something like Kernel 11, Chromium 150, Firefox 130.
Totally crap in my opinion.

[updatelee]

I use a combination of qemu and virtual box. Qemu is far more complicated to setup and much less reliable, graphics issues and keyboard issues everywhere. But it supports pcie sharing. Everything else I use virtual box for, it just works.

UDL

[david_lynch]

I normally prefer to use container based virtualization, but I have to say, virtualbox is great - featureful and easy to work with. I can't see any downside.

When I need to bring up some test VMS, virtualbox is my goto, because it just works, and easily does all the things I need it to do.

[schmidtbag]

Virtualbox isn't dead but it is far from thriving. It's incredibly outdated and ever since Oracle bought out Sun it was basically just maintained enough to keep up with modern OSes, but otherwise it will likely never be improved, and there is a lot of room for improvement.

[milkylainen]

Virtualbox isn't dead but it is far from thriving. It's incredibly outdated and ever since Oracle bought out Sun it was basically just maintained enough to keep up with modern OSes, but otherwise it will likely never be improved, and there is a lot of room for improvement.

How do you figure the incredibly outdated? What features are you missing that can be rightfully asked to be supported as a "expected minimum feature support" from this free product?
The last major release with some large features was released 9 months ago. They make a new maintainance release on average every month.
Sure. It is not VMWare. Oracle seem more hellbent on chocking every one of its project to death than to make them strive... but It is still free. It is easy to setup and use. It works for most people. It supports paravirtualization, framebuffer captures and some other nifty stuff. The PCI-passthrough is broken. I've talked to them about it but it is a non prioritized feature. Most people simply do not use pci-passthrough. And from where they are coming, they are absolutely right about that.
I suspect that will get fixed too sooner or later as they discover more people are likely to use it.

[schmidtbag]

How do you figure the incredibly outdated? What features are you missing that can be rightfully asked to be supported as a "expected minimum feature support" from this free product?

Off the top of my head, IOMMU support is pretty lacking, performance is terrible compared to alternatives (free or non-free), and the emulated GPU is all around crap. The 5.0 release finally addressed some problems like lacking XHCI support, performance fixes, and some new instruction sets, which is great, but a bit late. Some distros are still stuck in 4.x.

Sure. It is not VMWare. Oracle seem more hellbent on chocking every one of its project to death than to make them strive... but It is still free. It is easy to setup and use. It works for most people. It supports paravirtualization, framebuffer captures and some other nifty stuff.

Not everything needs to be compared to VMWare. Xen is arguably better than VMWare or Parallels and it is free. The difference is Xen is strictly a hypervisor.

The PCI-passthrough is broken. I've talked to them about it but it is a non prioritized feature. Most people simply do not use pci-passthrough. And from where they are coming, they are absolutely right about that.
I suspect that will get fixed too sooner or later as they discover more people are likely to use it.

A bit of a chicken and egg situation. They don't want to support PCI-passthrough because nobody is using it, but nobody is using it because it's broken. If they got it (along with GART and GPU passthrough) to function properly, Virtualbox would have some huge leverage over it's competitors. Virtualbox appeals most to home users. If you could run the host off of an IGP and the guest OS with the discrete GPU, that would let people run any software they want with great performance.

For the record, I don't think VB is bad software and I don't think it's dying like other people do, but it doesn't have the attention it needs. Right now, it's just simply "good enough" and it fits a niche that it doesn't fulfill to people's expectations.

[andre30correia]

Off the top of my head, IOMMU support is pretty lacking, performance is terrible compared to alternatives (free or non-free), and the emulated GPU is all around crap. The 5.0 release finally addressed some problems like lacking XHCI support, performance fixes, and some new instruction sets, which is great, but a bit late. Some distros are still stuck in 4.x.


Not everything needs to be compared to VMWare. Xen is arguably better than VMWare or Parallels and it is free. The difference is Xen is strictly a hypervisor.

A bit of a chicken and egg situation. They don't want to support PCI-passthrough because nobody is using it, but nobody is using it because it's broken. If they got it (along with GART and GPU passthrough) to function properly, Virtualbox would have some huge leverage over it's competitors. Virtualbox appeals most to home users. If you could run the host off of an IGP and the guest OS with the discrete GPU, that would let people run any software they want with great performance.

For the record, I don't think VB is bad software and I don't think it's dying like other people do, but it doesn't have the attention it needs. Right now, it's just simply "good enough" and it fits a niche that it doesn't fulfill to people's expectations.

virtualbox is a good software, for desktop users, the 3d gpu emulator is weak but is good for testing or having a windows machine in linux host, simply and clean, vmware sucks in linux host, qemu/kvm the 3d is not good or not work if you only have one card this days, xen... same case