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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-ma

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
        tracker1 8y ago
        In this case, I think it's actual fishing...
        gruez 8y ago
        So 90% of cold-call recruiting/sales is also "phishing"?
        mynameisvlad 8y ago
        Those are completely different. One is "Hi my name is XYZ at company ABC. Do you want to talk about our product DEF?" to which you instantly know it's a sales call and how to respond. The other is specifically emailing employees asking about their use in order to build a case against their employer in the hopes of getting an enterprise agreement or lawsuit out of it. It's far more shady and the actual nature of the communication is not revealed until after the fact. For all the developer knows, it's just a support email from Oracle asking them about how they use their product.
        Dylan16807 8y ago
        Whether the intent is positive or negative is unrelated to whether it's phishing. You could phish someone's info and then send them a gift basket.
        mynameisvlad 8y ago
        Let me clear it up for you: "Hello my name is X I would like to sell you Y" is not phishing. It's not asking for any information. It's annoying, sure, but you know how to deal with it and they won't bother continuing when they know you're not interested (ie. by saying no) "Hello my name is X, I work at Oracle, do you have a few minutes to talk about your use of VirtualBox" followed by asking questions about how you use it in order to build a case against your employer can be perceived as phishing. They are either outright not representing or misrepresenting the purpose of the conversation, and asking for information for purposes other than what you'd expect. It doesn't fit the exact definition in the dictionary, but it's close enough and uses the same sort of tactics that it can easily be considered another example of it.
      - alpinewinter 8y ago
        Probably not the strict definition, but they are looking for information from employees they can use as leverage or in a lawsuit against the organization.
      - jstarfish 8y ago
        Spamming employees with officious emails and hoping one of them is dumb enough to respond with pertinent information that subverts them or their organization is the textbook definition of phishing. What does it mean to you?
        gruez 8y ago
        from wikipedia: >Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by disguising as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication "using virtualbox" isn't sensitive information. I haven't read the emails, but I doubt Oracle is disguising themselves as the company's IT department or something.
        jstarfish 8y ago
        If you don't think information that subjects an entity to massive legal liability is sensitive, then I really don't understand where you're coming from. The entire point of these emails is to bypass established channels by getting random employees to leak information. If they want licensing information, there's an IT point of contact for that. Or Contracts. Or Legal. They are literally fishing for information leakage that would give them grounds to sue. > I doubt Oracle is disguising themselves as the company's IT department or something. They wouldn't. At this stage the point is to convey a false sense of authority without being outright fraud. You have to wrap everything in vague but threatening insinuations-- "help us or you could face fines of up to a bazillion dollars, and/or you might go to JAIL."
        gruez 8y ago
        >If you don't think information that subjects an entity to massive legal liability is sensitive, then I really don't understand where you're coming from. The employees were already subjecting their company to legal liability when they were using unlicensed software. >The entire point of these emails is to bypass established channels by getting random employees to leak information. If they want licensing information, there's an IT point of contact for that. Or Contracts. Or Legal. They are literally fishing for information leakage that would give them grounds to sue. So if I'm Oracle and I'm trying to find unlicensed enterprise users, what am I supposed to do? Call up their IT/legal department and hope that they'll investigate for me, and respond with a truthful response? Is Oracle not allowed to investigate on their own for licensing infractions? I feel like the only reason people are up in arms about this is because Oracle is doing it. If some startup was doing this to discover that some big corp was not paying their licensing fees, no one would blink an eye. >They wouldn't. At this stage the point is to convey a false sense of authority without being outright fraud. You have to wrap everything in vague but threatening insinuations-- "help us or you could face fines of up to a bazillion dollars, and/or you might go to JAIL." Sure, but cops do the same thing (if not more). I'm not saying either is okay, but both are not "phishing".
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      I would definitely contact them. But they would not appreciate the reply.
  - chomp 8y ago
    Personal anecdote: They came after us, since the extension phones home and they could track it to our ASN. Asked us for an audit of all installs of VB. The idea was that they wanted to then charge us big money for a corporate license. Instead, IT banned it enterprise-wide. Which is sad, because we like it for Vagrant. We've since started moving all of our developer stuff to OpenShift, so we're not totally up a creek.
    - arminiusreturns 8y ago
      I have a devops guy trying to push me to use Vagrant at the moment, but I am aware of these issues with virtualbox. I was thinking about using one of the lxc shims, but now you have me curious, how useful is openshift in that "I want to spin local vms up for testing" approach? I thought it was much more geared to server and not workstation, as opposed to vagrant. Of course others are right, virt-manager is probably a better replacement I think.
      - chomp 8y ago
        So OpenShift (or OKD) is just Redhat's Kubernetes platform. If your dev team isn't already in a docker-like workflow, it's going to be a hard sell. I've found many devops-y people love to be able to SSH into the environment to change code as it runs, and that's not possible with an environment like this. You can spin up KVMs in OpenShift, but I have the feeling it's not going to be quite what you're looking for. I suppose it's all going to be a matter of what workflow is most comfortable for your devops people. If you have an OpenStack install, Vagrant can control those AND they can login and poke around. Also FYI virt-manager is deprecated in RHEL 8, and is superceded by Cockpit.
      - nullify88 8y ago
        Out of curiosity, what feature in the extension pack are you using with Vagrant?
        arminiusreturns 8y ago
        PXE booting mostly.
  - mattferderer 8y ago
    My last enterprise I worked at sent out an announcement that anyone with VirtualBox had to remove it. What amazed me was when I first started there & asked if I could install it, most everyone was clueless what it even was. So Oracle had to have done some audit that found it, because I don't believe more than 1 or 2 other people would have been using it.
- danmg 8y ago
  Solution: null route *.oracle.com.
- zaphirplane 8y ago
  Wow so those enterprises are paying massive money for consultants, Realestate, ms-office/windows, databases, CMS, ERP ... etc But don’t want to pay for using the VB extensions. The horror of it. No sympathy today
nailer 8y ago
From Boxes site: > While virt-manager does a very good job as a virtual machine management software, it's very much tailored for system administration. Exactly! Boxes looks really polished.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  It's anything but. It's utterly useless. Just use virt-manager while it lasts. It is being deprecated though, after which you will be forced to use boxes or the other virt-manager replacement.
  - DrPhish 8y ago
    Having never used Boxes before, I was excited for a better VM management tool than virt-manager. However, I just tried using it (on Debian stretch), and unfortunately I have to agree that it doesn't do much beyond look pretty. afaict you could only go to consoles, check a few resource usage graphs, send power commands and manage snapshots. There were very few configuration options and no ability to manipulate virtual hardware on existing machines. Also, there was no way to add remote libvirt instances from the GUI, and adding them into the config file (qemu+ssh) just made boxes crash. If virt-manager really is going to be deprecated, is there a good replacement out there? edit: Holy crap, it also managed to hibernate all the running VMs on my dev box when it crashed!?! Glad I didn't have anything too important running on it!
    - pseudalopex 8y ago
      It looks like Red Hat intends Cockpit (a web interface) to replace virt-manager eventually.[1] [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1659477 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1659477
juststeve 8y ago
from memory boxes has limited networking functionality though?
bayindirh 8y ago
We use virt-manager to virtualize servers on servers with joy, however I use VBox to virtualize Windows hosts with hardware acceleration if possible. How is the state of KVM's support about 3D acceleration, sound, drag'n drop and like?
- znpy 8y ago
  If you have on the host system a graphics card that you can fully dedicate to the guest system, you can then do pci-passthrough and let the guest system have nearly-full access to that graphic card with nearly full performances. Also, kvm has some nice features that AFAIK virtual box does not have. For example you can have gnu/linux and windows guests use the balloon memory driver, that basically allocates and deallocates memory from the host system. Imagine having a guest vm where you can say "this vm should have 2GB ram, but it might burst up to 24GB if needed, and then go back to 2GB when the need is satisfied". Can't do that with VBox (AFAIK - and it works on windows too!) Regarding sound, if you are virtualizing windows, imho you're better off connecting via rdp (avoid remmina, use rdesktop) and using local speakers as audio output.
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    How is pci-passthrough for hypervisor security? I’m speaking from a layman’s perspective, but there have been successful escapes through the GPU / GPU memory in the past right?
    - Hello71 8y ago
      Somewhat better than OpenGL passthrough, whose security can be summarized as between "basically none" and "absolutely none".
  - pizza234 8y ago
    > you can then do pci-passthrough and let the guest system have nearly-full access to that graphic card with nearly full performances. It is possible, but when it works and works well, which is not always the case. In addition, one may have to lock the card for usage with the guest only, since drivers may not be compatible with intermittent (=on/off) vfio usage. I've had mixed experiences, depending on the hardware. my current system is 100% stable, however, I don use the card on the host (it causes instability). My previous system worked badly, and it was essentially not usable.
robin_reala 8y ago
Linux only by the looks of things though.
- lloeki 8y ago
  The equivalent on macOS would leverage Hypervisor.framework, like xhyve or Veertu. https://github.com/machyve/xhyve https://github.com/machyve/xhyve https://veertu.com/anka-technology/#hypervisor https://veertu.com/anka-technology/#hypervisor
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    I gather that Veertu has (had?) a product called Veertu Desktop and it was open sourced, but they've wiped any mention of it from their website in favor of Anka Flow/Device/Build (commercial license only). This looks like the source, found in a github repo of someone who works for Cisco. Maybe a former Veertu employee, or just someone who happened to fork a copy before Veertu deleted it? At any rate, I can't find an official Veertu repo anymore. https://github.com/tithomas1/vdhh https://github.com/tithomas1/vdhh Last updates were 2 years ago and the installation instructions say "To Install Veertu Desktop on Mac, please visit veertu.com" which has deleted everything related to Veertu Desktop down to the knowledge base articles with release notes https://twitter.com/veertu_labs/status/818584467954495488 https://twitter.com/veertu_labs/status/818584467954495488 Seems like a pretty thoroughly dead product. Haven't heard of xhyve before, but between the two that's the one worth looking at.
    - regularfry 8y ago
      Not only open sourced, but GPLv2'd. Ripe for forking, if one felt so inclined.
      - wlesieutre 8y ago
        Sure but GPLv2 doesn't help you if all copies of the source code are gone, so be sure to grab a copy of that vdhh repo now in case tithomas1 removes his. I imagine it's not in a working state on current versions of macOS, what with the security changes that Apple makes pretty much every year. But if someone wanted to try to get it going again they certainly could.
lmedinas 8y ago
Sorry but it could be (even remotely closely) to a Linux only solution.
ianai 8y ago
You make a good point, but not a good recommendation. This is a Mac OS virtualization app, and your options are Linux only. Its an oversight, at best. I get that Apples messed up their evosystem, but that’s not this conversation.
- watersb 8y ago
  VirtualBox is a cross-platform app. The user interface looks like Java to me.
  - Quekid5 8y ago
    The UI is Qt-based, I believe.
  - moondowner 8y ago
    The UI is written in Qt. E.g. for older VirtualBox versions, the virtualbox-qt package was required to be installed in order to have the GUI.
- tatref 8y ago
  No, VirtualBox is Windows, Linux, MacOS
  - ianai 8y ago
    Whoops, I forgot.
Proven 8y ago
That's garbage. I am not trapped. It's free enough as far as I am concerned.
caycep 8y ago
I think the advantage of VB is its installer and ease of creating and spinning up desktop VMs. The last time I tried using virt manager, I decided it wasn't for me, at its then-level of polish, but this was probably back in 2011 or 2012 or something. Boxes seems promising in this regard...hopefully it gets some momentum behind it.
badsectoracula 8y ago
I do not understand, Virtual Box is free software, the versions distributed through most common Linux distributions does not contain any non-free components and the binaries on the site are released under the GPLv2. The extensions you mention are a separate download that you explicitly have to download and it is mentioned around the download that they are under a different license. How exactly are you trapped by using GPL software?
- NullPrefix 8y ago
  Without the extension VirtualBox VMs are pretty much shit.
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    For tools like Vagrant, not at all. They are very useful if you want to attach USB devices directly to the VM, use the built-in webcam and so on, but I've used VirtualBox for years without installing the extension once.
    - torstenvl 8y ago
      USB 2.0 and 3.0 are not fully supported without the extension pack.
      - koolba 8y ago
        Which again are irrelevant for the common “just for Vagrant” use case.
        rbanffy 8y ago
        I have used it for testing on different Windows browsers, to check whether https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font would install correctly, and running some Windows software from my bank. The only time I needed the extensions was when I needed to reflash my Blackberry 10 DevAlpha (whose battery, sadly, is dead - I loved that phone)
jweir 8y ago
To be clear, VirtualBox and Guest Additions are open source. It is only the Extension Pack which is licensed. No? Until today I had never even heard of the Extension pack, and have never had any need to use it.
- kop316 8y ago
  You are correct. It is of note that the extesions pack has a lot of useful add-ons, but you did have to explicitly install it.
nunez 8y ago
Thank you for providing these links. I've been looking for an alternative to VBox for quite some time (I don't like anything that Oracle touches, as Oracle is a law firm with a tech problem); these help.
jancsika 8y ago
I'll try that. I use Virtualbox to compile CI artifacts for Ubuntu, Debian, OSX (homebrew), and Windows (msys2) by using the virtualbox executor of gitlab. The other available gitlab-runner executors to build these artifacts cross-flatform are: virtualbox, parallels, docker, kubernetes. Boxes and virt-manager aren't on that list, so they are out. Parallels isn't FLOSS. Can I use docker or kubernetes to build my desired artifacts?
veeableful 8y ago
What VM should I use if I’m on macOS?
pizza234 8y ago
This is somewhat excessive. There are still valid use cases where Virtualbox comes for free - private users or professional users/companies with a relatively small number of workstations (Oracle's going after companies who use a large number of unlicensed installations). Also, it is still possible to build a free extension pack; it would be a great project. After all, Virtualbox is GPL, and it shouldn't be underestimated the amount of work that has been, and is being, put into it.

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
      - tracker1 8y ago
        In this case, I think it's actual fishing...
      - gruez 8y ago
        So 90% of cold-call recruiting/sales is also "phishing"?
        mynameisvlad 8y ago
        Those are completely different. One is "Hi my name is XYZ at company ABC. Do you want to talk about our product DEF?" to which you instantly know it's a sales call and how to respond. The other is specifically emailing employees asking about their use in order to build a case against their employer in the hopes of getting an enterprise agreement or lawsuit out of it. It's far more shady and the actual nature of the communication is not revealed until after the fact. For all the developer knows, it's just a support email from Oracle asking them about how they use their product.
        Dylan16807 8y ago
        Whether the intent is positive or negative is unrelated to whether it's phishing. You could phish someone's info and then send them a gift basket.
        mynameisvlad 8y ago
        Let me clear it up for you: "Hello my name is X I would like to sell you Y" is not phishing. It's not asking for any information. It's annoying, sure, but you know how to deal with it and they won't bother continuing when they know you're not interested (ie. by saying no) "Hello my name is X, I work at Oracle, do you have a few minutes to talk about your use of VirtualBox" followed by asking questions about how you use it in order to build a case against your employer can be perceived as phishing. They are either outright not representing or misrepresenting the purpose of the conversation, and asking for information for purposes other than what you'd expect. It doesn't fit the exact definition in the dictionary, but it's close enough and uses the same sort of tactics that it can easily be considered another example of it.
    - alpinewinter 8y ago
      Probably not the strict definition, but they are looking for information from employees they can use as leverage or in a lawsuit against the organization.
    - jstarfish 8y ago
      Spamming employees with officious emails and hoping one of them is dumb enough to respond with pertinent information that subverts them or their organization is the textbook definition of phishing. What does it mean to you?
      - gruez 8y ago
        from wikipedia: >Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by disguising as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication "using virtualbox" isn't sensitive information. I haven't read the emails, but I doubt Oracle is disguising themselves as the company's IT department or something.
        jstarfish 8y ago
        If you don't think information that subjects an entity to massive legal liability is sensitive, then I really don't understand where you're coming from. The entire point of these emails is to bypass established channels by getting random employees to leak information. If they want licensing information, there's an IT point of contact for that. Or Contracts. Or Legal. They are literally fishing for information leakage that would give them grounds to sue. > I doubt Oracle is disguising themselves as the company's IT department or something. They wouldn't. At this stage the point is to convey a false sense of authority without being outright fraud. You have to wrap everything in vague but threatening insinuations-- "help us or you could face fines of up to a bazillion dollars, and/or you might go to JAIL."
        gruez 8y ago
        >If you don't think information that subjects an entity to massive legal liability is sensitive, then I really don't understand where you're coming from. The employees were already subjecting their company to legal liability when they were using unlicensed software. >The entire point of these emails is to bypass established channels by getting random employees to leak information. If they want licensing information, there's an IT point of contact for that. Or Contracts. Or Legal. They are literally fishing for information leakage that would give them grounds to sue. So if I'm Oracle and I'm trying to find unlicensed enterprise users, what am I supposed to do? Call up their IT/legal department and hope that they'll investigate for me, and respond with a truthful response? Is Oracle not allowed to investigate on their own for licensing infractions? I feel like the only reason people are up in arms about this is because Oracle is doing it. If some startup was doing this to discover that some big corp was not paying their licensing fees, no one would blink an eye. >They wouldn't. At this stage the point is to convey a false sense of authority without being outright fraud. You have to wrap everything in vague but threatening insinuations-- "help us or you could face fines of up to a bazillion dollars, and/or you might go to JAIL." Sure, but cops do the same thing (if not more). I'm not saying either is okay, but both are not "phishing".
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    I would definitely contact them. But they would not appreciate the reply.
- chomp 8y ago
  Personal anecdote: They came after us, since the extension phones home and they could track it to our ASN. Asked us for an audit of all installs of VB. The idea was that they wanted to then charge us big money for a corporate license. Instead, IT banned it enterprise-wide. Which is sad, because we like it for Vagrant. We've since started moving all of our developer stuff to OpenShift, so we're not totally up a creek.
  - arminiusreturns 8y ago
    I have a devops guy trying to push me to use Vagrant at the moment, but I am aware of these issues with virtualbox. I was thinking about using one of the lxc shims, but now you have me curious, how useful is openshift in that "I want to spin local vms up for testing" approach? I thought it was much more geared to server and not workstation, as opposed to vagrant. Of course others are right, virt-manager is probably a better replacement I think.
    - chomp 8y ago
      So OpenShift (or OKD) is just Redhat's Kubernetes platform. If your dev team isn't already in a docker-like workflow, it's going to be a hard sell. I've found many devops-y people love to be able to SSH into the environment to change code as it runs, and that's not possible with an environment like this. You can spin up KVMs in OpenShift, but I have the feeling it's not going to be quite what you're looking for. I suppose it's all going to be a matter of what workflow is most comfortable for your devops people. If you have an OpenStack install, Vagrant can control those AND they can login and poke around. Also FYI virt-manager is deprecated in RHEL 8, and is superceded by Cockpit.
    - nullify88 8y ago
      Out of curiosity, what feature in the extension pack are you using with Vagrant?
      - arminiusreturns 8y ago
        PXE booting mostly.
- mattferderer 8y ago
  My last enterprise I worked at sent out an announcement that anyone with VirtualBox had to remove it. What amazed me was when I first started there & asked if I could install it, most everyone was clueless what it even was. So Oracle had to have done some audit that found it, because I don't believe more than 1 or 2 other people would have been using it.
danmg 8y ago
Solution: null route *.oracle.com.
zaphirplane 8y ago
Wow so those enterprises are paying massive money for consultants, Realestate, ms-office/windows, databases, CMS, ERP ... etc But don’t want to pay for using the VB extensions. The horror of it. No sympathy today

nailer 8y ago

From Boxes site: > While virt-manager does a very good job as a virtual machine management software, it's very much tailored for system administration. Exactly! Boxes looks really polished.

bubblethink 8y ago
It's anything but. It's utterly useless. Just use virt-manager while it lasts. It is being deprecated though, after which you will be forced to use boxes or the other virt-manager replacement.
- DrPhish 8y ago
  Having never used Boxes before, I was excited for a better VM management tool than virt-manager. However, I just tried using it (on Debian stretch), and unfortunately I have to agree that it doesn't do much beyond look pretty. afaict you could only go to consoles, check a few resource usage graphs, send power commands and manage snapshots. There were very few configuration options and no ability to manipulate virtual hardware on existing machines. Also, there was no way to add remote libvirt instances from the GUI, and adding them into the config file (qemu+ssh) just made boxes crash. If virt-manager really is going to be deprecated, is there a good replacement out there? edit: Holy crap, it also managed to hibernate all the running VMs on my dev box when it crashed!?! Glad I didn't have anything too important running on it!
  - pseudalopex 8y ago
    It looks like Red Hat intends Cockpit (a web interface) to replace virt-manager eventually.[1] [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1659477 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1659477

juststeve 8y ago

from memory boxes has limited networking functionality though?

bayindirh 8y ago

We use virt-manager to virtualize servers on servers with joy, however I use VBox to virtualize Windows hosts with hardware acceleration if possible. How is the state of KVM's support about 3D acceleration, sound, drag'n drop and like?

znpy 8y ago
If you have on the host system a graphics card that you can fully dedicate to the guest system, you can then do pci-passthrough and let the guest system have nearly-full access to that graphic card with nearly full performances. Also, kvm has some nice features that AFAIK virtual box does not have. For example you can have gnu/linux and windows guests use the balloon memory driver, that basically allocates and deallocates memory from the host system. Imagine having a guest vm where you can say "this vm should have 2GB ram, but it might burst up to 24GB if needed, and then go back to 2GB when the need is satisfied". Can't do that with VBox (AFAIK - and it works on windows too!) Regarding sound, if you are virtualizing windows, imho you're better off connecting via rdp (avoid remmina, use rdesktop) and using local speakers as audio output.
- robin_reala 8y ago
  How is pci-passthrough for hypervisor security? I’m speaking from a layman’s perspective, but there have been successful escapes through the GPU / GPU memory in the past right?
  - Hello71 8y ago
    Somewhat better than OpenGL passthrough, whose security can be summarized as between "basically none" and "absolutely none".
- pizza234 8y ago
  > you can then do pci-passthrough and let the guest system have nearly-full access to that graphic card with nearly full performances. It is possible, but when it works and works well, which is not always the case. In addition, one may have to lock the card for usage with the guest only, since drivers may not be compatible with intermittent (=on/off) vfio usage. I've had mixed experiences, depending on the hardware. my current system is 100% stable, however, I don use the card on the host (it causes instability). My previous system worked badly, and it was essentially not usable.

robin_reala 8y ago

Linux only by the looks of things though.

lloeki 8y ago
The equivalent on macOS would leverage Hypervisor.framework, like xhyve or Veertu. https://github.com/machyve/xhyve https://github.com/machyve/xhyve https://veertu.com/anka-technology/#hypervisor https://veertu.com/anka-technology/#hypervisor
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  I gather that Veertu has (had?) a product called Veertu Desktop and it was open sourced, but they've wiped any mention of it from their website in favor of Anka Flow/Device/Build (commercial license only). This looks like the source, found in a github repo of someone who works for Cisco. Maybe a former Veertu employee, or just someone who happened to fork a copy before Veertu deleted it? At any rate, I can't find an official Veertu repo anymore. https://github.com/tithomas1/vdhh https://github.com/tithomas1/vdhh Last updates were 2 years ago and the installation instructions say "To Install Veertu Desktop on Mac, please visit veertu.com" which has deleted everything related to Veertu Desktop down to the knowledge base articles with release notes https://twitter.com/veertu_labs/status/818584467954495488 https://twitter.com/veertu_labs/status/818584467954495488 Seems like a pretty thoroughly dead product. Haven't heard of xhyve before, but between the two that's the one worth looking at.
  - regularfry 8y ago
    Not only open sourced, but GPLv2'd. Ripe for forking, if one felt so inclined.
    - wlesieutre 8y ago
      Sure but GPLv2 doesn't help you if all copies of the source code are gone, so be sure to grab a copy of that vdhh repo now in case tithomas1 removes his. I imagine it's not in a working state on current versions of macOS, what with the security changes that Apple makes pretty much every year. But if someone wanted to try to get it going again they certainly could.

lmedinas 8y ago

Sorry but it could be (even remotely closely) to a Linux only solution.

ianai 8y ago

You make a good point, but not a good recommendation. This is a Mac OS virtualization app, and your options are Linux only. Its an oversight, at best. I get that Apples messed up their evosystem, but that’s not this conversation.

watersb 8y ago
VirtualBox is a cross-platform app. The user interface looks like Java to me.
- Quekid5 8y ago
  The UI is Qt-based, I believe.
- moondowner 8y ago
  The UI is written in Qt. E.g. for older VirtualBox versions, the virtualbox-qt package was required to be installed in order to have the GUI.
tatref 8y ago
No, VirtualBox is Windows, Linux, MacOS
- ianai 8y ago
  Whoops, I forgot.

Proven 8y ago

That's garbage. I am not trapped. It's free enough as far as I am concerned.

caycep 8y ago

I think the advantage of VB is its installer and ease of creating and spinning up desktop VMs. The last time I tried using virt manager, I decided it wasn't for me, at its then-level of polish, but this was probably back in 2011 or 2012 or something. Boxes seems promising in this regard...hopefully it gets some momentum behind it.

badsectoracula 8y ago

I do not understand, Virtual Box is free software, the versions distributed through most common Linux distributions does not contain any non-free components and the binaries on the site are released under the GPLv2. The extensions you mention are a separate download that you explicitly have to download and it is mentioned around the download that they are under a different license. How exactly are you trapped by using GPL software?

NullPrefix 8y ago
Without the extension VirtualBox VMs are pretty much shit.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  For tools like Vagrant, not at all. They are very useful if you want to attach USB devices directly to the VM, use the built-in webcam and so on, but I've used VirtualBox for years without installing the extension once.
  - torstenvl 8y ago
    USB 2.0 and 3.0 are not fully supported without the extension pack.
    - koolba 8y ago
      Which again are irrelevant for the common “just for Vagrant” use case.
      - rbanffy 8y ago
        I have used it for testing on different Windows browsers, to check whether https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font would install correctly, and running some Windows software from my bank. The only time I needed the extensions was when I needed to reflash my Blackberry 10 DevAlpha (whose battery, sadly, is dead - I loved that phone)

jweir 8y ago

To be clear, VirtualBox and Guest Additions are open source. It is only the Extension Pack which is licensed. No? Until today I had never even heard of the Extension pack, and have never had any need to use it.

kop316 8y ago
You are correct. It is of note that the extesions pack has a lot of useful add-ons, but you did have to explicitly install it.

nunez 8y ago

Thank you for providing these links. I've been looking for an alternative to VBox for quite some time (I don't like anything that Oracle touches, as Oracle is a law firm with a tech problem); these help.

jancsika 8y ago

I'll try that. I use Virtualbox to compile CI artifacts for Ubuntu, Debian, OSX (homebrew), and Windows (msys2) by using the virtualbox executor of gitlab. The other available gitlab-runner executors to build these artifacts cross-flatform are: virtualbox, parallels, docker, kubernetes. Boxes and virt-manager aren't on that list, so they are out. Parallels isn't FLOSS. Can I use docker or kubernetes to build my desired artifacts?

veeableful 8y ago

What VM should I use if I’m on macOS?

pizza234 8y ago

This is somewhat excessive. There are still valid use cases where Virtualbox comes for free - private users or professional users/companies with a relatively small number of workstations (Oracle's going after companies who use a large number of unlicensed installations). Also, it is still possible to build a free extension pack; it would be a great project. After all, Virtualbox is GPL, and it shouldn't be underestimated the amount of work that has been, and is being, put into it.