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It would be interesting for this audience to compare QEMU against VirtualBox.. My own bias is that I will be purchasing a Mac Studio around XMas as a flutter a

It would be interesting for this audience to compare QEMU against VirtualBox.. My own bias is that I will be purchasing a Mac Studio around XMas as a flutter app build machine. I know that VirtualBox has guest OS additions to pass through graphics acceleration from the Host OS to the Guest OS. Does QEMU have this for MS Windows and Linux *6 guest OSes?

xxpor 3y ago
The quick summary is VirtualBox vs kvm/qemu is a classic commercial product vs open source comparison. Without going too deep into the actual architecture, VirtualBox is much easier to get started with (although check out something like Proxmox), but qemu is much more powerful. AFAIK, there are no features in VirtualBox that can't also be done with kvm/qemu, but there's a lot of things that can be done with kvm/qemu that can't be done in VirtualBox. I say kvm/qemu because the actual hypervisor is kvm, while qemu is used for control and device emulation. qemu can also emulate full machines, which is obviously much slower but can be extremely useful.
roblabla 3y ago
As a personal VM machine, vbox is fine. But for anything more involved, it's got a lot of rough edges. We used to use virtualbox at work to run our CI workload (spawning a fresh VM for every job). Long story short: It does not scale well at all. Its scripting API is terrible, we ran into endless network problems (for instance, its builtin dhcp server would sometimes fail to flush expired IPs, leading to running out of IPs to give), and it would sometimes just freeze up entirely, requiring us to restart the virtualbox services. We switched over to kubevirt[0] (essentially qemu/kvm inside a kube cluster) to handle our CI, and it's been a much, much smoother sailing since then. And it even allowed us to run macos VMs on linux hosts, something that we never managed to get working in vbox. > Does QEMU have this for MS Windows and Linux *6 guest OSes? QEmu has virgl[1] for paravirtualized graphics, but its windows drivers are unsigned afaict, so you can't really use it there. Works fine on linux, so long as your mesa and kernel aren't super ancient.

xxpor 3y ago

The quick summary is VirtualBox vs kvm/qemu is a classic commercial product vs open source comparison. Without going too deep into the actual architecture, VirtualBox is much easier to get started with (although check out something like Proxmox), but qemu is much more powerful. AFAIK, there are no features in VirtualBox that can't also be done with kvm/qemu, but there's a lot of things that can be done with kvm/qemu that can't be done in VirtualBox. I say kvm/qemu because the actual hypervisor is kvm, while qemu is used for control and device emulation. qemu can also emulate full machines, which is obviously much slower but can be extremely useful.

roblabla 3y ago

As a personal VM machine, vbox is fine. But for anything more involved, it's got a lot of rough edges. We used to use virtualbox at work to run our CI workload (spawning a fresh VM for every job). Long story short: It does not scale well at all. Its scripting API is terrible, we ran into endless network problems (for instance, its builtin dhcp server would sometimes fail to flush expired IPs, leading to running out of IPs to give), and it would sometimes just freeze up entirely, requiring us to restart the virtualbox services. We switched over to kubevirt[0] (essentially qemu/kvm inside a kube cluster) to handle our CI, and it's been a much, much smoother sailing since then. And it even allowed us to run macos VMs on linux hosts, something that we never managed to get working in vbox. > Does QEMU have this for MS Windows and Linux *6 guest OSes? QEmu has virgl[1] for paravirtualized graphics, but its windows drivers are unsigned afaict, so you can't really use it there. Works fine on linux, so long as your mesa and kernel aren't super ancient.