17 ms·

VirtualBox 6.0 released

364 points by johanhammar 8y ago

fuzzy2 8y ago
> Major rework of user interface with simpler and more powerful application and virtual machine set-up Anyone found out yet what that’s supposed to mean? Looks all the same to me except colors and icons and animations nobody needs.
sandstrom 8y ago
Too bad none of these two bugs has been fixed: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9069 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9069 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12597 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12597 (cannot use `sendfile` in nginx inside a virtualbox, due to an eight year old bug)
- nickjj 8y ago
  Yeah it's crazy that it's not fixed yet. About 5 years when I was using VMs for my development environment I remember that bug causing all sorts of issues with assets not loading correctly. It's also why I recommend people avoid Docker Toolbox like the plague since it uses VirtualBox under the hood. Either use Docker for Windows (if you have Windows 10 Pro), or roll your own VMWare Player (free) VM which doesn't have that bug, has way better I/O performance in the end and isn't much harder to set up.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    This might surprise you but neither of these 2 are bugs. VirtualBox shared folders simply don't offer the guarantees of a local filesystem. They are not a local filesystem, they are network drives mounted as NFS, with the abysmal support and quirk that comes with that. sendfile() doesn't work on network drives. it never did. the host is not aware of changes made to the remote filesystem from another host. it cannot see updated files unless it checks for remote changes.
    - fuzzy2 8y ago
      > They are not a local filesystem, they are network drives mounted as NFS, with the abysmal support and quirk that comes with that. They’re actually not, which is exactly the problem. vboxsf is its own “real” filesystem. The code is super simple (too simple, perhaps): https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk/src/VBox/Additions/linux/sharedfolders https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk/src/VBox/Addit... It contains many shortcuts with reporting free inodes and whatnot.
    - nickjj 8y ago
      But from our point of view (the end user), it feels like a bug with VirtualBox because this problem doesn't exist when using VMWare or Hyper-V. I used a VMWare Player driven VM as a primary Linux development environment for full time web development for literally 4 years straight and I encountered the issue 0 times, but with VirtualBox I encountered the issue in 1 day. Maybe it's not technically a bug with VirtualBox, but it is something that makes VirtualBox unsuitable as a dev environment for web development.
      - pas 8y ago
        You're right that it's a major UX hurdle. But it's not a bug in an advertised feature. Not a technical oversight, not a glitch. Yes, vboxfs is very restrictive, but then again, the whole cross platform virtualization is a very thin curtain of magic over the nasty differences behind.
ngrilly 8y ago
I'm unable to find anything about the vboximg-mount utility in the documentation, except in the release notes.
- spurgu 8y ago
  https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E97728_01/E97727/html/vboximg-mount.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E97728_01/E97727/html/vboximg-mou...
  - ngrilly 8y ago
    Thanks! But I wonder why the section 6.11 about vboximg-mount is missing on the .org version of the manual: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06.html https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06.html
jbverschoor 8y ago
No usage of hypervisor.framework... so never mind.
- sys_64738 8y ago
  I've been using Parallels Desktop Lite which is free for Linux and MacOS X guests.
tmn007 8y ago
Be careful about VirtualBox Extensions which is non free on commercial environments. Oracle is hunting non compliance and VB provides them with lots of telemetry.
- CrLf 8y ago
  If you're using virtualbox together with vagrant, you're highly unlikely to need the extension pack anyway.
- maaaats 8y ago
  > Be careful about VirtualBox Extensions Don't you mean: Be careful to follow the licensing for whatever products you use.
  - organsnyder 8y ago
    The extension pack is extremely easy to download by accident: for instance, it comes in the default Chocolately installation unless you pass a flag to disable it. With Oracle actively going around and sending threatening letters to enterprises with extensions download traffic coming from their IP blocks, it's easy to accidentally get in a bad situation.
    - AlexCoventry 8y ago
      This is separate from the guest extensions ISO image, right? What kind of functionality do the extensions discussed here cover?
      - sound1 8y ago
        I would love to know thw answer to above question
      - organsnyder 8y ago
        Yes, this is separate from the guest extensions. Here's information on it: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch02.html#intro-installing https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch02.html#intro-installing
orf 8y ago
> Added support for using Hyper-V as the fallback execution core on Windows host, to avoid inability to run VMs at the price of reduced performance Any comparisons between hyper-v and virtual box performance? I would have assumed hyper-v would be more performant.
- Daviey 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, why do you have a presumption that hyper-v would have better performance?
  - orf 8y ago
    This may be completely wrong, but as I understand it when you enable hyper-v it sits above your Windows install, and runs your windows as a hyper-v VM. So, rather than running a userland vbox process that has OS overhead (especially around disk IO) it can run much closer to the metal.
    - zamalek 8y ago
      If I remember correctly, Hyper-V is not strictly a type 1 hypervisor ("runs your windows as a hyper-v VM") but comes close. The VMs still run pretty close to the metal, but your host OS is mostly free from hypervisor interference.
  - jsjohnst 8y ago
    Because it’s a well known fact that VirtualBox has been dodgy slow for years. Especially around I/O, it’s been the laggard.
  - kls 8y ago
    VB has lagged in support for good hardware acceleration, it's been an issue for years.
- dagw 8y ago
  Tested them quite a bit about 18 month ago and hyper-v was slightly faster in the benchmarks I ran (especially when it came to IO), but was a laggy stuttering mess when trying to use a Linux desktop.
_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
I've switched our development environment years ago to VMWare (OSX) from VirtualBox because it didn't work well with fixed IPs, would change the IPs and I couldn't pin them - worked for some time then changed the IP. Has this changed?
throwaway77384 8y ago
Is the link down for anyone else?
robert_foss 8y ago
Avoid VirtualBox and becoming trapped in the non-free & personal use only extension by using one of the very decent open source alternatives Boxes[1] or virt-manager[2] [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/Boxes https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/Boxes [2] https://virt-manager.org/ https://virt-manager.org/
- organsnyder 8y ago
  Even worse: Oracle is going around and threatening to sue enterprises that show traffic to the extensions download site from their IP blocks. Happened recently at a previous employer of mine.
  - setquk 8y ago
    Any public references for this anywhere?
    - alpinewinter 8y ago
      I don't know of any public references, but I can confirm this is happening to government entities as well. Oracle is being extremely aggressive and mounting what is essentially a phishing campaign against organizations that it sees accessing the extension download page. They are e-mailing employees directly and asking them to contact Oracle.
      - gruez 8y ago
        >Oracle is being extremely aggressive and mounting what is essentially a phishing campaign against organizations that it sees accessing the extension download page. They are e-mailing employees directly and asking them to contact Oracle. You have a very broad definition of "phishing".
        phamilton 8y ago
        > They are e-mailing employees directly and asking them to contact Oracle That would certainly look a lot like phishing
DNT_ 8y ago
Is there anyone who could explain to me why virtualbox is still being developed? I don't mean that as an attack on the developers or the software but Oracle ruined pretty much all of Sun's software with VBox being one of the only two exception along with Java.
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  Define “ruined” to you. By my definition, oracle took something that was “ok’ish, especially when you didn’t want to pay and just had basic needs” product and have slowly chipped away anything that could be considered good for most.
  - apsdsm 8y ago
    ↑ this sounds like a pretty good definition of ruined.
    - jsjohnst 8y ago
      Exactly my thoughts, but GP claimed that Vbox wasn’t ruined.
  - oblio 8y ago
    They ruined OpenOffice and Hudson. Luckily those were hard forked by the communities.
- intsunny 8y ago
  I've always assumed Oracle deeply depends on VirtualBox internally, and the amount of feedback they receive via public channels is far cheaper than keeping it closed source and having to internally test the tool.
zapzupnz 8y ago
Holy cow, what an ugly user interface. I mean, it wasn't exactly a Matisse before, but it's just hideous now on macOS. Who thought "easy to use" rhymed with "make the icons look like nearly identical and somewhat indistinguishable blue squares"? Who decided that an already rather unprofessional drawing of Tux needed to be transformed into Baby's First Vector Drawing™? And why, when previous versions already did a semi-respectable job of at least _pretending_ to look like a native Cocoa app on macOS, does version 6 not only regress its implementation of the Aqua theme down to everything-is-grey but do so by getting rid of the gradient that emulated NSToolbar on most settings windows whilst then _adding_ ugly gradients to the list of VM settings on the main window in place of the vastly more functional rounded rectangles with separate headers of previous versions? You see, if it's possible to regress the user interface so badly _when it was already fine_, I don't hold much hope for the rest of the technology. Call me a snob, but it reeks of sloppiness.
- wyclif 8y ago
  I just downloaded/updated it for macOS and then set up a fresh Debian Stretch VM on it. Wow, you weren't kidding, it's still a hideous UI and it looks like they haven't even tried to make it look anything like a native app.
- jf- 8y ago
  Exactly the kind of nitpicking negativity I expected to see when I opened the thread. It’s an app for running VMs, not a piece of consumer software, it’s not being marketed based on how it looks. Say what you will about oracle’s business practises, but it’s a crying shame that this is the top comment. Edit: was top comment. Crying shame averted.
  - slantyyz 8y ago
    >> It’s an app for running VMs, not a piece of consumer software On Macs, Fusion and Parallels are arguably consumer software. In the early days of x86 on Mac, they were the carrot to lure a lot of non-technical people who used Windows at work to get a Mac. Since there are a lot of people who gravitate towards "free as in beer" software, you can't not expect a Mac user to at least look at VirtualBox as a consumer app. There are probably plenty of Mac oriented listicles that recommend VirtualBox as a free option for running Windows VMs on Mac.
bakery2k 8y ago
Is anyone using VirtualBox on the desktop? Specifically, to run Linux/macOS/Windows guests on a macOS host? Would you recommend it? Or is the best option VMware Fusion, Parallels, or something else?
- orf 8y ago
  I've used Parallels before and found it amazing - fast, simple and easy. It's not worth the cost unless you use it very frequently though.
  - sys_64738 8y ago
    Parallel Desktop Lite is free for all guests except Windows.
- octopoc 8y ago
  I recently got a Mac and wanted to avoid the cost of Parallels, so I tried VirtualBox first. It was insanely slow. Like, I would be typing text into a VM and I would type a line, then wait and watch the characters appear. This happened on a 2018 Macbook Pro host with 32GB RAM. This happened on both Windows and Ubuntu guests. So, I tried Parallels and it was so fast I can't really tell the difference between the host and guest in terms of speed. I highly recommend Parallels.
  - stinos 8y ago
    I tried VirtualBox first. It was insanely slow Colleague of mine has Windows running on VMWare on OSX and it's not much better. Also, but this might be because of the keyboard/OS/VMWare settings he uses, but when my muscle memory gets to work and starts using basic key combinations it feels like half of the time they are intercepted by OSX and do funny things, opening apps I don't want or switching desktops or whatever etc. No joy. All in all, of all non-commandline development experiences I ever encountered it's probably the worst. Parallels on the other hand was indeed more 'just works, get shit done'.
  - SyneRyder 8y ago
amelius 8y ago
Since this is Oracle, I'm most interested to hear if there have been any changes in the license.
znpy 8y ago
I love how the website has been keep basically unchanged through the years. Its design is clear and easily navigable. I hope it doesn't change.
- xbryanx 8y ago
  I think (guessing) that's because this site is 90% just-a-slightly-themed Trac install. It's admirable that the design for that tool has stayed so consistent. https://trac.edgewall.org/ https://trac.edgewall.org/
  - znpy 8y ago
    It's nice when things that work don't get change for changing's sake.
benkillin 8y ago
According to the change log, the guest to host escape vulnerability with the e1000 networking driver was not fixed, or at least it is not listed as being fixed. Is this correct that it is not fixed? https://github.com/MorteNoir1/virtualbox_e1000_0day https://github.com/MorteNoir1/virtualbox_e1000_0day
- geerlingguy 8y ago
  Oracle has an arcane policy of not mentioning any security fixes for any of their managed products, except for once a quarter. The flaw has been fixed as of 5.2.22, but the VirtualBox devs are not allowed to mention it until sometime in January I think.
PolCPP 8y ago
'MacOS Guest Additions: initial support' I thought that with a dozen hacks it already worked? What did they add? Official support?
Koshkin 8y ago
But the true hacker uses QEMU.
Thaxll 8y ago
What virt solution on win10 has 3d acceleration functional on Ubuntu? The Unity Ubuntu desktop is dead slow on VirtualBox...
roywiggins 8y ago
I'm sure there are more useful changes but honestly I'm just happy that it finally supports my HiDPI screen.
rvanmil 8y ago
Using this release with Vagrant and the ubuntu/bionic64 (20181214.0.0) box resulted in a very slow boot process which caused Vagrant to abort due to the boot timeout. It looks like this was caused by a workaround I had implemented for the exact same issue on previous releases: vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--uartmode1", "disconnected"] After removing this line the box boots up normally again.
plq 8y ago
Virtualbox is not your only option if you want to use Vagrant. Vagrant has decent plugins for qemu (vagrant-libvirt) and lxd (vagrant-lxd) Make sure you get your KVM, Qemu and libvirt setup right and run: vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt vagrant init generic/ubuntu1804 vagrant up --provider=libvirt You can export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=libvirt to avoid passing --provider=libvirt to vagrant all the time. vagrant-lxd is less mature but just as useful, especially when you need to run stuff with erratic RSS graphs.
- genocidicbunny 8y ago
  You can also put ENV['VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER'] = <provider> In your Vagrantfile to force a specific provider to always be used for that Vagrantfile.
cat199 8y ago
> iSCSI: In cases where there is no ambiguity, the LUN of an iSCSI target is automatically determined, for targets with non-zero LUNs Any SAN/Storage admins care to comment on if this is really great or really scary?
Annatar 8y ago
Still no Solaris USB fixes after more than five years of busted / non-working USB pass-through. Good work, great job...
AltruisticGap 8y ago
The VMSVGA for linux guests sounds awesome, since they previously removed 3D support for "linux guests using Wayland".. ie. Ubuntu 18.10. Can any linux experts here explain briefly what is required to get this VMSVGA support? (win 10 host, Ubuntu guest) Do I have to grab additional drivers or "guest additions" from VMware? Or will Ubuntu 18.10 have 3D support out of the box if I run in with VB6 ?
excalibur 8y ago
"You are already running the most recent version of VirtualBox." -VirtualBox 5.2.22

364 points by johanhammar 8y ago

> Major rework of user interface with simpler and more powerful application and virtual machine set-up Anyone found out yet what that’s supposed to mean? Looks all the same to me except colors and icons and animations nobody needs.

sandstrom 8y ago

Too bad none of these two bugs has been fixed: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9069 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9069 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12597 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12597 (cannot use `sendfile` in nginx inside a virtualbox, due to an eight year old bug)

nickjj 8y ago
Yeah it's crazy that it's not fixed yet. About 5 years when I was using VMs for my development environment I remember that bug causing all sorts of issues with assets not loading correctly. It's also why I recommend people avoid Docker Toolbox like the plague since it uses VirtualBox under the hood. Either use Docker for Windows (if you have Windows 10 Pro), or roll your own VMWare Player (free) VM which doesn't have that bug, has way better I/O performance in the end and isn't much harder to set up.
- user5994461 8y ago
  This might surprise you but neither of these 2 are bugs. VirtualBox shared folders simply don't offer the guarantees of a local filesystem. They are not a local filesystem, they are network drives mounted as NFS, with the abysmal support and quirk that comes with that. sendfile() doesn't work on network drives. it never did. the host is not aware of changes made to the remote filesystem from another host. it cannot see updated files unless it checks for remote changes.
  - fuzzy2 8y ago
    > They are not a local filesystem, they are network drives mounted as NFS, with the abysmal support and quirk that comes with that. They’re actually not, which is exactly the problem. vboxsf is its own “real” filesystem. The code is super simple (too simple, perhaps): https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk/src/VBox/Additions/linux/sharedfolders https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk/src/VBox/Addit... It contains many shortcuts with reporting free inodes and whatnot.
  - nickjj 8y ago
    But from our point of view (the end user), it feels like a bug with VirtualBox because this problem doesn't exist when using VMWare or Hyper-V. I used a VMWare Player driven VM as a primary Linux development environment for full time web development for literally 4 years straight and I encountered the issue 0 times, but with VirtualBox I encountered the issue in 1 day. Maybe it's not technically a bug with VirtualBox, but it is something that makes VirtualBox unsuitable as a dev environment for web development.
    - pas 8y ago
      You're right that it's a major UX hurdle. But it's not a bug in an advertised feature. Not a technical oversight, not a glitch. Yes, vboxfs is very restrictive, but then again, the whole cross platform virtualization is a very thin curtain of magic over the nasty differences behind.

ngrilly 8y ago

I'm unable to find anything about the vboximg-mount utility in the documentation, except in the release notes.

spurgu 8y ago
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E97728_01/E97727/html/vboximg-mount.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E97728_01/E97727/html/vboximg-mou...
- ngrilly 8y ago
  Thanks! But I wonder why the section 6.11 about vboximg-mount is missing on the .org version of the manual: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06.html https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06.html

jbverschoor 8y ago

No usage of hypervisor.framework... so never mind.

sys_64738 8y ago
I've been using Parallels Desktop Lite which is free for Linux and MacOS X guests.

tmn007 8y ago

Be careful about VirtualBox Extensions which is non free on commercial environments. Oracle is hunting non compliance and VB provides them with lots of telemetry.

CrLf 8y ago
If you're using virtualbox together with vagrant, you're highly unlikely to need the extension pack anyway.
maaaats 8y ago
> Be careful about VirtualBox Extensions Don't you mean: Be careful to follow the licensing for whatever products you use.
- organsnyder 8y ago
  The extension pack is extremely easy to download by accident: for instance, it comes in the default Chocolately installation unless you pass a flag to disable it. With Oracle actively going around and sending threatening letters to enterprises with extensions download traffic coming from their IP blocks, it's easy to accidentally get in a bad situation.
  - AlexCoventry 8y ago
    This is separate from the guest extensions ISO image, right? What kind of functionality do the extensions discussed here cover?
    - sound1 8y ago
      I would love to know thw answer to above question
    - organsnyder 8y ago
      Yes, this is separate from the guest extensions. Here's information on it: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch02.html#intro-installing https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch02.html#intro-installing

orf 8y ago

> Added support for using Hyper-V as the fallback execution core on Windows host, to avoid inability to run VMs at the price of reduced performance Any comparisons between hyper-v and virtual box performance? I would have assumed hyper-v would be more performant.

Daviey 8y ago
Out of curiosity, why do you have a presumption that hyper-v would have better performance?
- orf 8y ago
  This may be completely wrong, but as I understand it when you enable hyper-v it sits above your Windows install, and runs your windows as a hyper-v VM. So, rather than running a userland vbox process that has OS overhead (especially around disk IO) it can run much closer to the metal.
  - zamalek 8y ago
    If I remember correctly, Hyper-V is not strictly a type 1 hypervisor ("runs your windows as a hyper-v VM") but comes close. The VMs still run pretty close to the metal, but your host OS is mostly free from hypervisor interference.
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  Because it’s a well known fact that VirtualBox has been dodgy slow for years. Especially around I/O, it’s been the laggard.
- kls 8y ago
  VB has lagged in support for good hardware acceleration, it's been an issue for years.
dagw 8y ago
Tested them quite a bit about 18 month ago and hyper-v was slightly faster in the benchmarks I ran (especially when it came to IO), but was a laggy stuttering mess when trying to use a Linux desktop.

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago

I've switched our development environment years ago to VMWare (OSX) from VirtualBox because it didn't work well with fixed IPs, would change the IPs and I couldn't pin them - worked for some time then changed the IP. Has this changed?

throwaway77384 8y ago

Is the link down for anyone else?

robert_foss 8y ago

Avoid VirtualBox and becoming trapped in the non-free & personal use only extension by using one of the very decent open source alternatives Boxes[1] or virt-manager[2] [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/Boxes https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/Boxes [2] https://virt-manager.org/ https://virt-manager.org/

organsnyder 8y ago
Even worse: Oracle is going around and threatening to sue enterprises that show traffic to the extensions download site from their IP blocks. Happened recently at a previous employer of mine.
- setquk 8y ago
  Any public references for this anywhere?
  - alpinewinter 8y ago
    I don't know of any public references, but I can confirm this is happening to government entities as well. Oracle is being extremely aggressive and mounting what is essentially a phishing campaign against organizations that it sees accessing the extension download page. They are e-mailing employees directly and asking them to contact Oracle.
    - gruez 8y ago
      >Oracle is being extremely aggressive and mounting what is essentially a phishing campaign against organizations that it sees accessing the extension download page. They are e-mailing employees directly and asking them to contact Oracle. You have a very broad definition of "phishing".
      - phamilton 8y ago
        > They are e-mailing employees directly and asking them to contact Oracle That would certainly look a lot like phishing

DNT_ 8y ago

Is there anyone who could explain to me why virtualbox is still being developed? I don't mean that as an attack on the developers or the software but Oracle ruined pretty much all of Sun's software with VBox being one of the only two exception along with Java.

jsjohnst 8y ago
Define “ruined” to you. By my definition, oracle took something that was “ok’ish, especially when you didn’t want to pay and just had basic needs” product and have slowly chipped away anything that could be considered good for most.
- apsdsm 8y ago
  ↑ this sounds like a pretty good definition of ruined.
  - jsjohnst 8y ago
    Exactly my thoughts, but GP claimed that Vbox wasn’t ruined.
- oblio 8y ago
  They ruined OpenOffice and Hudson. Luckily those were hard forked by the communities.
intsunny 8y ago
I've always assumed Oracle deeply depends on VirtualBox internally, and the amount of feedback they receive via public channels is far cheaper than keeping it closed source and having to internally test the tool.

zapzupnz 8y ago

Holy cow, what an ugly user interface. I mean, it wasn't exactly a Matisse before, but it's just hideous now on macOS. Who thought "easy to use" rhymed with "make the icons look like nearly identical and somewhat indistinguishable blue squares"? Who decided that an already rather unprofessional drawing of Tux needed to be transformed into Baby's First Vector Drawing™? And why, when previous versions already did a semi-respectable job of at least _pretending_ to look like a native Cocoa app on macOS, does version 6 not only regress its implementation of the Aqua theme down to everything-is-grey but do so by getting rid of the gradient that emulated NSToolbar on most settings windows whilst then _adding_ ugly gradients to the list of VM settings on the main window in place of the vastly more functional rounded rectangles with separate headers of previous versions? You see, if it's possible to regress the user interface so badly _when it was already fine_, I don't hold much hope for the rest of the technology. Call me a snob, but it reeks of sloppiness.

wyclif 8y ago
I just downloaded/updated it for macOS and then set up a fresh Debian Stretch VM on it. Wow, you weren't kidding, it's still a hideous UI and it looks like they haven't even tried to make it look anything like a native app.
jf- 8y ago
Exactly the kind of nitpicking negativity I expected to see when I opened the thread. It’s an app for running VMs, not a piece of consumer software, it’s not being marketed based on how it looks. Say what you will about oracle’s business practises, but it’s a crying shame that this is the top comment. Edit: was top comment. Crying shame averted.
- slantyyz 8y ago
  >> It’s an app for running VMs, not a piece of consumer software On Macs, Fusion and Parallels are arguably consumer software. In the early days of x86 on Mac, they were the carrot to lure a lot of non-technical people who used Windows at work to get a Mac. Since there are a lot of people who gravitate towards "free as in beer" software, you can't not expect a Mac user to at least look at VirtualBox as a consumer app. There are probably plenty of Mac oriented listicles that recommend VirtualBox as a free option for running Windows VMs on Mac.

bakery2k 8y ago

Is anyone using VirtualBox on the desktop? Specifically, to run Linux/macOS/Windows guests on a macOS host? Would you recommend it? Or is the best option VMware Fusion, Parallels, or something else?

orf 8y ago
I've used Parallels before and found it amazing - fast, simple and easy. It's not worth the cost unless you use it very frequently though.
- sys_64738 8y ago
  Parallel Desktop Lite is free for all guests except Windows.
octopoc 8y ago
I recently got a Mac and wanted to avoid the cost of Parallels, so I tried VirtualBox first. It was insanely slow. Like, I would be typing text into a VM and I would type a line, then wait and watch the characters appear. This happened on a 2018 Macbook Pro host with 32GB RAM. This happened on both Windows and Ubuntu guests. So, I tried Parallels and it was so fast I can't really tell the difference between the host and guest in terms of speed. I highly recommend Parallels.
- stinos 8y ago
  I tried VirtualBox first. It was insanely slow Colleague of mine has Windows running on VMWare on OSX and it's not much better. Also, but this might be because of the keyboard/OS/VMWare settings he uses, but when my muscle memory gets to work and starts using basic key combinations it feels like half of the time they are intercepted by OSX and do funny things, opening apps I don't want or switching desktops or whatever etc. No joy. All in all, of all non-commandline development experiences I ever encountered it's probably the worst. Parallels on the other hand was indeed more 'just works, get shit done'.
- SyneRyder 8y ago

amelius 8y ago

Since this is Oracle, I'm most interested to hear if there have been any changes in the license.

znpy 8y ago

I love how the website has been keep basically unchanged through the years. Its design is clear and easily navigable. I hope it doesn't change.

xbryanx 8y ago
I think (guessing) that's because this site is 90% just-a-slightly-themed Trac install. It's admirable that the design for that tool has stayed so consistent. https://trac.edgewall.org/ https://trac.edgewall.org/
- znpy 8y ago
  It's nice when things that work don't get change for changing's sake.

benkillin 8y ago

According to the change log, the guest to host escape vulnerability with the e1000 networking driver was not fixed, or at least it is not listed as being fixed. Is this correct that it is not fixed? https://github.com/MorteNoir1/virtualbox_e1000_0day https://github.com/MorteNoir1/virtualbox_e1000_0day

geerlingguy 8y ago
Oracle has an arcane policy of not mentioning any security fixes for any of their managed products, except for once a quarter. The flaw has been fixed as of 5.2.22, but the VirtualBox devs are not allowed to mention it until sometime in January I think.

PolCPP 8y ago

'MacOS Guest Additions: initial support' I thought that with a dozen hacks it already worked? What did they add? Official support?

Koshkin 8y ago

But the true hacker uses QEMU.

Thaxll 8y ago

What virt solution on win10 has 3d acceleration functional on Ubuntu? The Unity Ubuntu desktop is dead slow on VirtualBox...

roywiggins 8y ago

I'm sure there are more useful changes but honestly I'm just happy that it finally supports my HiDPI screen.

rvanmil 8y ago

Using this release with Vagrant and the ubuntu/bionic64 (20181214.0.0) box resulted in a very slow boot process which caused Vagrant to abort due to the boot timeout. It looks like this was caused by a workaround I had implemented for the exact same issue on previous releases: vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--uartmode1", "disconnected"] After removing this line the box boots up normally again.

plq 8y ago

Virtualbox is not your only option if you want to use Vagrant. Vagrant has decent plugins for qemu (vagrant-libvirt) and lxd (vagrant-lxd) Make sure you get your KVM, Qemu and libvirt setup right and run: vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt vagrant init generic/ubuntu1804 vagrant up --provider=libvirt You can export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=libvirt to avoid passing --provider=libvirt to vagrant all the time. vagrant-lxd is less mature but just as useful, especially when you need to run stuff with erratic RSS graphs.

genocidicbunny 8y ago
You can also put ENV['VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER'] = <provider> In your Vagrantfile to force a specific provider to always be used for that Vagrantfile.

cat199 8y ago

> iSCSI: In cases where there is no ambiguity, the LUN of an iSCSI target is automatically determined, for targets with non-zero LUNs Any SAN/Storage admins care to comment on if this is really great or really scary?

Annatar 8y ago

Still no Solaris USB fixes after more than five years of busted / non-working USB pass-through. Good work, great job...

AltruisticGap 8y ago

The VMSVGA for linux guests sounds awesome, since they previously removed 3D support for "linux guests using Wayland".. ie. Ubuntu 18.10. Can any linux experts here explain briefly what is required to get this VMSVGA support? (win 10 host, Ubuntu guest) Do I have to grab additional drivers or "guest additions" from VMware? Or will Ubuntu 18.10 have 3D support out of the box if I run in with VB6 ?

excalibur 8y ago

"You are already running the most recent version of VirtualBox." -VirtualBox 5.2.22