7 ms·

Let's Try Gnome Boxes

65 points by ctsdownloads 4y ago

asojfdowgh 4y ago
I'd like a "Configure in VMM" button in boxes if it detects VMM installed, since they are just different front-ends for the same backend.
amelius 4y ago
Modern computing increasingly relies on the GPU, and it is disappointing to see that virtualization tools are lacking in this area.
- Linux-Fan 4y ago
  You could also put it the other way around: Modern computing increasingly relies on virtualization and it is disappointing to see that GUI tools increasingly require GPU acceleration making them inaccessible inside virtualized environments.
  - amelius 4y ago
    Some tasks really require GPU, e.g. in high-performance computing and neural networks.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Why would you want to embrace virtualization that throws away most of your compute power?
    - RealStickman_ 4y ago
      It wouldn't throw away any power if the GPU makers decided to 1. Enable SR-IOV (or whatever their equivalent is named) for all GPUs, so people could split the GPU power as they wanted and allocate these shares to VMs 2. Continued to evolve SR-IOV to reduce overhead and allow more dynamic allocation of resources
yellowapple 4y ago
I use Boxes on my work laptop, which runs RHEL 8; my employer has a preset for it that generates a Windows 10 Enterprise VM already fully configured in much the same way as a corporate-issued Windows laptop would be. I don't use it for much, but it does work pretty dang seamlessly for my purposes. On my own machines I historically used VirtualBox, but I've lately been (re-)trying VMM on openSUSE (which is dead simple to setup from YaST, which has a button for "Install Hypervisor and Tools"; I simply checked the boxes for "KVM server" and "KVM tools" and it automatically installed everything I needed). So far I've been pretty impressed. I say "(re-)trying" because I've actually used that exact setup before for an on-prem server at a past employer, but running some servers in VMs is a fair bit different from, say, trying to put a Haiku or TempleOS desktop through its paces :)
t0bia_s 4y ago
Las time I tried Boxes, Win10 in it don't have internet access. VM has no problem with that. However... Damn GPU pass-trough is so nerdy, that I give up and had to stay with Win as my main OS (because of Adobe that I would like to use on linux).
- RealStickman_ 4y ago
  Boxes really isn't designed to enable easy GPU passthrough. It requires a lot of additional configuration on the host system as well, not just the VM.
  - t0bia_s 4y ago
    Virtualization of Win on linux with GPU pass-through generally is not designed to be easy at all. It's actually disappointing.
resoluteteeth 4y ago
Boxes has a fantastically simple ui but, as was the experience of the author of this article, it is really easy to run into something you can't configure with it so you have to switch to virt-manager.
- seltzered_ 4y ago
  FWIW, I got leary of Gnome Boxes (probably because I usually need to run a commercial OS like Windows) and found myself pretty happy with quickemu/quickgui - https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickgui https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickgui
- nulbyte 4y ago
  It works for what I need, but yes, if you need to configure something it doesn't support, it's a hassle. If you reconfigure it in virt-manager, Boxes will happily run the new config, until you change something else in Boxes, and then it will obliterate your changes. The one problem I have, and I can't figure out if this is Boxes or something else: If the machine suspends, spinning it back up again results in a wrong clock. I can reset it, but it doesn't set itself automatically. I can't even find reasonable documentation on the issue.
  - geofft 4y ago
    I believe https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/virtualization_deployment_and_administration_guide/chap-kvm_guest_timing_management https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... has decent docs on what to do here: - Run NTP in the guest - If at all possible, run the qemu guest agent, which can inform the guest to resync when it resumes from suspend - If available, use the "kvm-clock" clock source (but that's just a source of timing ticks, not of actual time, so it doesn't help a lot with suspend)
    - nulbyte 4y ago
      Fedora has chronyd installed by default, which is supposed to do what ntpd does. I also installed the guest agent. This is one of those have-to-use-virt-manager things. It doesn't seem to fix the time, but then I have been running it from Boxes. Maybe that's why.
encryptluks2 4y ago
I prefer to just use virt-manager. It is a more comparable alternative. Gnome Boxes is cool to showcase virtualization for people that might not have any experience, but it is very dumbed down. People are going to want to optimize their Windows virtualization and Gnome Boxes is not the best place to do it.
0xbadc0de5 4y ago
Boxes seems to be trying to target a non-existent market - dumbed-down virtualization. At least in my experience, when I'm running VM's, I typically want a sane set of defaults backed up by the ability to customize to the maximum degree in order to replicate the target environment. Virt-manager does this exceptionally well, as the author correctly notes. Virt-manager also allows you to connect to remote libvirt hosts and access remote VMs as well - which is exceptionally useful.
- WhyNotHugo 4y ago
  VirtualBox worked for that same audience about 10 years ago. It was stupid simple to set up, and had pretty sane defaults. It's only gone downhill since, the last few times I tried, I couldn't even get it to work. I thank Oracle for this.
- glandium 4y ago
  I'd argue virt-manager's UX is a little clunky, but that doesn't justify going that far.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    I think it's a shame that Boxes doesn't show the VMs and connections I have setup with virt-manager on the same machine.
    - ColonelPhantom 4y ago
      If you select the correct connection in virt-manager (iirc it's called something like "libvirt (User session)") then you will see your Boxes VMs, and vice versa a VM created under that connection will appear in Boxes. Doesn't solve remote issues, but can still be useful if you want to e.g. set some advanced options for a Boxes VM.
  - beebeepka 4y ago
    Clunky? More like spartan. I can't even set basic things such as port forwarding.
glandium 4y ago
I'll be bluntly honest: instead of writing yet another virtualization thingy that nobody asked for, how about fixing long standing issues with the existing ones? Example I recently hit with virt-manager: external snapshots are not supported but UEFI is not supported with internal snapshots. The worst part? You'll find 5 year old SO posts about this...
- TingPing 4y ago
  These statements make no sense. One is a small and simple UI amd the other is deep technical issues with libvirt. The development of one has literally no overlap with your issues.
  - glandium 4y ago
    Well, it turns out Boxes is older than I thought (more than 10 years old), but it also looks like it came out of Red Hat (where virt-manager also comes from), so there is still a choice of where resources are allocated...
bitwize 4y ago
Ah, yes, GNOME simplicity: feature-poor, but hard depends on a complex tangle of bloated RedHatWare.
hda2 4y ago
I'd love to try this but I'm hesitant for fear that the developers decide to remove some feature that's critical to how I use their software down the line. Gnome is infamous for their drive-by function-follows-form design philosophy. Their software appears to be designed elusively for the perfect ideal user.
grandinj 4y ago
Excellent! So good to see people building easy to use UIs that get you started with stuff like this. A lot of time you just want to get something simple done and this kind of UI is perfect for that.
fito 4y ago

65 points by ctsdownloads 4y ago

I'd like a "Configure in VMM" button in boxes if it detects VMM installed, since they are just different front-ends for the same backend.

amelius 4y ago

Modern computing increasingly relies on the GPU, and it is disappointing to see that virtualization tools are lacking in this area.

Linux-Fan 4y ago
You could also put it the other way around: Modern computing increasingly relies on virtualization and it is disappointing to see that GUI tools increasingly require GPU acceleration making them inaccessible inside virtualized environments.
- amelius 4y ago
  Some tasks really require GPU, e.g. in high-performance computing and neural networks.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Why would you want to embrace virtualization that throws away most of your compute power?
  - RealStickman_ 4y ago
    It wouldn't throw away any power if the GPU makers decided to 1. Enable SR-IOV (or whatever their equivalent is named) for all GPUs, so people could split the GPU power as they wanted and allocate these shares to VMs 2. Continued to evolve SR-IOV to reduce overhead and allow more dynamic allocation of resources

yellowapple 4y ago

I use Boxes on my work laptop, which runs RHEL 8; my employer has a preset for it that generates a Windows 10 Enterprise VM already fully configured in much the same way as a corporate-issued Windows laptop would be. I don't use it for much, but it does work pretty dang seamlessly for my purposes. On my own machines I historically used VirtualBox, but I've lately been (re-)trying VMM on openSUSE (which is dead simple to setup from YaST, which has a button for "Install Hypervisor and Tools"; I simply checked the boxes for "KVM server" and "KVM tools" and it automatically installed everything I needed). So far I've been pretty impressed. I say "(re-)trying" because I've actually used that exact setup before for an on-prem server at a past employer, but running some servers in VMs is a fair bit different from, say, trying to put a Haiku or TempleOS desktop through its paces :)

t0bia_s 4y ago

Las time I tried Boxes, Win10 in it don't have internet access. VM has no problem with that. However... Damn GPU pass-trough is so nerdy, that I give up and had to stay with Win as my main OS (because of Adobe that I would like to use on linux).

RealStickman_ 4y ago
Boxes really isn't designed to enable easy GPU passthrough. It requires a lot of additional configuration on the host system as well, not just the VM.
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  Virtualization of Win on linux with GPU pass-through generally is not designed to be easy at all. It's actually disappointing.

resoluteteeth 4y ago

Boxes has a fantastically simple ui but, as was the experience of the author of this article, it is really easy to run into something you can't configure with it so you have to switch to virt-manager.

seltzered_ 4y ago
FWIW, I got leary of Gnome Boxes (probably because I usually need to run a commercial OS like Windows) and found myself pretty happy with quickemu/quickgui - https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickgui https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickgui
nulbyte 4y ago
It works for what I need, but yes, if you need to configure something it doesn't support, it's a hassle. If you reconfigure it in virt-manager, Boxes will happily run the new config, until you change something else in Boxes, and then it will obliterate your changes. The one problem I have, and I can't figure out if this is Boxes or something else: If the machine suspends, spinning it back up again results in a wrong clock. I can reset it, but it doesn't set itself automatically. I can't even find reasonable documentation on the issue.
- geofft 4y ago
  I believe https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/virtualization_deployment_and_administration_guide/chap-kvm_guest_timing_management https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... has decent docs on what to do here: - Run NTP in the guest - If at all possible, run the qemu guest agent, which can inform the guest to resync when it resumes from suspend - If available, use the "kvm-clock" clock source (but that's just a source of timing ticks, not of actual time, so it doesn't help a lot with suspend)
  - nulbyte 4y ago
    Fedora has chronyd installed by default, which is supposed to do what ntpd does. I also installed the guest agent. This is one of those have-to-use-virt-manager things. It doesn't seem to fix the time, but then I have been running it from Boxes. Maybe that's why.

encryptluks2 4y ago

I prefer to just use virt-manager. It is a more comparable alternative. Gnome Boxes is cool to showcase virtualization for people that might not have any experience, but it is very dumbed down. People are going to want to optimize their Windows virtualization and Gnome Boxes is not the best place to do it.

0xbadc0de5 4y ago

Boxes seems to be trying to target a non-existent market - dumbed-down virtualization. At least in my experience, when I'm running VM's, I typically want a sane set of defaults backed up by the ability to customize to the maximum degree in order to replicate the target environment. Virt-manager does this exceptionally well, as the author correctly notes. Virt-manager also allows you to connect to remote libvirt hosts and access remote VMs as well - which is exceptionally useful.

WhyNotHugo 4y ago
VirtualBox worked for that same audience about 10 years ago. It was stupid simple to set up, and had pretty sane defaults. It's only gone downhill since, the last few times I tried, I couldn't even get it to work. I thank Oracle for this.
glandium 4y ago
I'd argue virt-manager's UX is a little clunky, but that doesn't justify going that far.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  I think it's a shame that Boxes doesn't show the VMs and connections I have setup with virt-manager on the same machine.
  - ColonelPhantom 4y ago
    If you select the correct connection in virt-manager (iirc it's called something like "libvirt (User session)") then you will see your Boxes VMs, and vice versa a VM created under that connection will appear in Boxes. Doesn't solve remote issues, but can still be useful if you want to e.g. set some advanced options for a Boxes VM.
- beebeepka 4y ago
  Clunky? More like spartan. I can't even set basic things such as port forwarding.

glandium 4y ago

I'll be bluntly honest: instead of writing yet another virtualization thingy that nobody asked for, how about fixing long standing issues with the existing ones? Example I recently hit with virt-manager: external snapshots are not supported but UEFI is not supported with internal snapshots. The worst part? You'll find 5 year old SO posts about this...

TingPing 4y ago
These statements make no sense. One is a small and simple UI amd the other is deep technical issues with libvirt. The development of one has literally no overlap with your issues.
- glandium 4y ago
  Well, it turns out Boxes is older than I thought (more than 10 years old), but it also looks like it came out of Red Hat (where virt-manager also comes from), so there is still a choice of where resources are allocated...

bitwize 4y ago

Ah, yes, GNOME simplicity: feature-poor, but hard depends on a complex tangle of bloated RedHatWare.

hda2 4y ago

I'd love to try this but I'm hesitant for fear that the developers decide to remove some feature that's critical to how I use their software down the line. Gnome is infamous for their drive-by function-follows-form design philosophy. Their software appears to be designed elusively for the perfect ideal user.

grandinj 4y ago

Excellent! So good to see people building easy to use UIs that get you started with stuff like this. A lot of time you just want to get something simple done and this kind of UI is perfect for that.

fito 4y ago