9 ms·

VirtualBox 4.3 released

155 points by conductor 13y ago

mitchellh 13y ago
A couple important notes about this: * Vagrant is being updated to work with 4.3 now. A release should be out today or at the latest tomorrow. (UPDATE: Vagrant 1.3.5 is now out and supports VirtualBox 4.3) * VirtualBox 4.3 doesn't run at all on Mavericks (10.9) because their kernel extensions aren't signed. OS X 10.9 requires signed kexts now. So the changelog where they said "limited" Mavericks support they actually should've said "no support". (UPDATE: Some people are reporting it is working for them on Mavericks. I can't get it to work. YMMV) Based on these two bullet points, I would stick with VirtualBox 4.2 for the time being. The bullet point that says "rewritten VT-x and AMD-V code" is especially vague and could be "super unstable virtual machine manager" just as easily as it can mean "slight performance improvements." So be careful. Other than that, it is good to see VirtualBox have some sort of big release. This is their first major ("4.x") release in over a year. I also want to note that if you are on Mavericks, VMware Fusion works perfectly. As a disclaimer to this sentence though: I make money from Vagrant + VMware users. I'm not trying to advertise that, I just want to state that Vagrant _itself_ is fine. VirtualBox 4.3 doesn't work. VirtualBox 4.2 does. VMware Fusion 5 and 6 does.
- whalesalad 13y ago
  Thanks a lot for this comment. After upgrading to Mavericks I had to ditch my hacked together and hand-compiled PHP setup, so I converted to Vagrant+Virtualbox. I'd have hated to break that with the upgrade to 4.3 haha.
  - jtreminio 13y ago
    I made something for you: https://puphpet.com https://puphpet.com
- CJefferson 13y ago
  I tried googling for mac os x signed kernel extensions, but couldn't find anything useful. Is this an easy issue to fix (get free key, slap a signature on), or could this be a more serious issue?
  - mitchellh 13y ago
    The change is still under NDA. If you sign into your Apple dev account and look up the WWDC talk on OS X kernel extension development, you'll find it within that slide deck. Deep, I know. I also reported the issue to the VirtualBox team many weeks ago and they confirmed the bug and know it exists. It just seems like it wasn't important enough for them to fix prior to release.
    - untog 13y ago
      Honestly, the fact that the change is under NDA seems like reason enough for them to not bother yet. Who knows what NDA violation an open source project could make in discussing how they are going to implement it.
      - glibgil 13y ago
        I know what NDA violation they could make. It is called "NDA violation". It is where you sign an NDA and then you disclose information. Release of source code could be considered a disclosure. Now Apple can go right ahead and do a whole lot of nothing against VirtualBox and Oracle because no one cares. Neither should you. Stop lionizing contract law. It is a civil matter and no big deal almost always and especially when no money has changed hands.
- Xylakant 13y ago
  > VirtualBox doesn't work. VMware does. I haven't tried Virtualbox 4.3 but Virtualbox 4.2 sort of works on Mavericks. The kernel extensions don't load on boot, but can be loaded manually. I blogged about that here http://asquera.de/development/2013/06/20/vagrant-on-mavericks/ http://asquera.de/development/2013/06/20/vagrant-on-maverick...
  - mitchellh 13y ago
    Good catch. I updated that. Thanks!
    - alwillis 13y ago
      It also depends on how your Gatekeeper settings are set; mine are set to "Mac App store and indentified developers". The OS alerted me that the kexts were unsigned, it said it would load them anyway.
- chrisrogers 13y ago
  Curious. I went ahead and updated, as my use of VirtualBox isn't critical to my workflow. I received warning during install of the unsigned kexts, but the warning stated that they would be loaded anyway. I'm now running vbox 4.3 just fine on Mavericks GM.
- aroch 13y ago
  Unsigned extensions should run just fine under Mavericks, you'll get an error/warning message on first install but a reboot should load it fine
  - Angostura 13y ago
    Does it perhaps depend on your Gatekeeper settings? which could explain the diverse experiences being reported.
    - aroch 13y ago
      It does, Gatekeeper has gotten a little more restrictive as the seeds have gone out (at least compared to where it started). If you don't have "allow me to install whatever I fucking want" checked Gatekeeper will refuse to load unsigned Kexts...which I suppose is ultimately not a bad thing. The majority of users have no idea what a kext is or recognize the security implications of them
- yeukhon 13y ago
  http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/vmware/known-issues.html http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/vmware/known-issues.html So this is now the only issue left. If I remember correct there used to be multiple issues with VMWare + Vagrant. I just checked now and seems only one left. Correct? I might actually switch to fusion + vagrant on my mac osx if the support is stable.
  - mitchellh 13y ago
    That is correct. The adapter is continuously improved and is at a very stable point now.
  - mafro 13y ago
    I can attest to the solid Vagrant+VMWare Fusion support. I've been using it for at least the last six months and have not seen a single problem. I've completely stopped using VirtualBox now! Good work mitchellh :)
- taternuts 13y ago
  Awesome, thanks for the information - I've been using VirtualBox + Vagrant nightly for the last few weeks with a huge smile on my face, I really love that tool. What a pain in the ass it is to get a native RoR dev. environment working...
- aioprisan 13y ago
  actually, Vagrant works on Mavericks but on every updated version, from beta to beta, I had to remove Vagrant completely and reinstall vagrant fresh.. the kernel extensions don't seem to carry over, but it definitely working on Mavericks
stevenleeg 13y ago
Congrats to the virtualbox team! I still wish they'd consider adding retina support on OS X; that's the one thing keeping me from using it 24/7 :(.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  I am using 4.2 branch on my retina pro from early 2013. What's the issue? Do you have issue with launch a desktop version of Ubuntu? I normally launch server instance so I am fine. Just curious.
  - stevenleeg 13y ago
    It doesn't have retina support, so everything looks pixelated.
    - yeukhon 13y ago
      got it. thanks!
mathrawka 13y ago
If you rely on VirtualBox, I would recommend to hold off on upgrading until you are sure that it will not break your workflow. The big releases tend to have a way of introducing bugs, that although get fixed, can wreck your day if you depend on it.
- JimmyL 13y ago
  I just upgraded to 4.3 (Win7 host, Sandy Bridge Core i7 processor), and VirtualBox is now complaining that I've got more virtual cores (4) assigned to my guest than I have physical cores (2) on my host. While this is true, this wasn't an issue with 4.2. It still lets me run it, but it's not happy about it. EDIT: Further investigation shows that VirtualBox docs have always said this was a bad thing to do, but didn't used to throw up a warning when you did it anyways.
  - jlgaddis 13y ago
    > ... but didn't used to throw up a warning when you did it anyways. This is mentioned in the changelog, FWIW.
icn2 13y ago
I have used virtualbox and vmware player (free for non commercial user ). vmware player gave me much better experience.
- snowwindwaves 13y ago
  I have used virtualbox extensively and now have had to use VMware workstation 9 and 10 this last month and I much prefer virtual box. One more anecdote!
  - sahaskatta 13y ago
    Out of curiosity what is generally your host/guest OSes? Things had gotten pretty buggy with VirtualBox running Ubuntu 13.04 inside a Windows 8 PC. (Wonder if it was just me or others too.)
    - rebootthebox 13y ago
      2 out of 4 my boxes are Win 8 and I haven't noticed anything funny with Ubuntu 13.04. I use Linux guests fairly extensively.
- sahaskatta 13y ago
  Same here. I had been completely reliant on VirtualBox for ages. About a year or so ago it felt as though advancements slowed down, performance got incredibly slow, and things became buggy. I started using VMWare Player which definitely is a lot more polished, reliable, and way faster in my opinion.
- jebblue 13y ago
  I've used both for years, I consistently find VirtualBox to provide a much better experience.
walid 13y ago
It is worth noting that if you don't use the new features and running VirtualBox on old hardware there probably is no good reason to upgrade at the moment.
codexon 13y ago
I just installed 4.3 and tried running a directx9 program on XP with 3d acceleration and it caused the VM screen to flicker and not display any content. I hope Vbox will catch up with VMware player on 3d acceleration soon.
- pallandt 13y ago
  Same issue here, just different Win version. In my case it was easy to solve since I didn't really need 3D acceleration, so I ended up disabling it.
thex86 13y ago
VirtualBox is one of those projects that is a very important part of my daily use. But somehow I feel that it doesn't get much love from the open source community. Is it just me?
- autodidakto 13y ago
  I don't know the full story, but from what I've heard, it probably involves things like 1) Oracle owns it 2) It requires a non-free compiler to build the BIOS
  - slacka 13y ago
    1) It's GPL'd so nothing is stopping you or anyone else from forking it away from Oracle. 2) The Open Watcom compiler is not required to build VirtualBox at all. The actual compiler is free for anyone to download and use.[1] Other people here raised some legitimate points with the build and patch submission process that I also would like to see improved, but yours are just narrow minded prejudice. [1] https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12011 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12011
    - Argorak 13y ago
      VirtualBox is only partially open source and free: For example, USB2.0 and RDP support is non-free. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ Also note that they do openly admit that stopping to release under GPL 2.0 is not planned, but possible and they reserve the right to do so in future.
    - autodidakto 13y ago
      Please tell this to the Debian team (that they're narrow minded and prejudice) because I'd like them to move VB off of contrib (non free) to their free repos.
- CptCodeMonkey 13y ago
  Vbox's "api" is kind of an abomination. Vagrant succeeds because it parses sometimes non-machine friendly command line executable output.
chum 13y ago
I used virtualbox a lot for work and play, always with a debian guest. While my overall experience was good, there were two gotchas that really annoyed me: 1. When cloning VMs I would always have networking issues. The fix was known and simple (https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/660 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/660) but not intuitive to a casual user. 2. Installing the guest additions (drag-and-drop file support, shared clipboard, basically stuff you really want) as a kernel module can be a huge pain in the ass depending on what kernel you run. I never had any issues with a "stable" 2.x kernel, but with 3.x I had a difficult time finding the correct kernel headers and putting them in the correct place.
- hnha 13y ago
  some.distros have the guest additions in their repositories, that makes it easier.
riobard 13y ago
“Networking improvements: A new Network Address Translation (NAT) option allows virtual machines to talk to each other on the same host, and communicate with the outside world. ” This feature alone is worth the upgrade.
rcarmo 13y ago
Nice, but a couple of months too late for me. I've switched over to Parallels 9 on the Mac, and it is _much_ faster overall (not to mention better USB support). Also, I highly recommend Vagrant users to look into the vagrant-LXC plugin - that, too, is one heck of a lot faster than using either VirtualBox or VMware providers. I've documented my setup here: http://the.taoofmac.com/space/HOWTO/Vagrant http://the.taoofmac.com/space/HOWTO/Vagrant
pdknsk 13y ago
Maybe someone from the VirtualBox team can explain to me why VirtualBox for Ubuntu has a dependency on acroread-bin.

155 points by conductor 13y ago

A couple important notes about this: * Vagrant is being updated to work with 4.3 now. A release should be out today or at the latest tomorrow. (UPDATE: Vagrant 1.3.5 is now out and supports VirtualBox 4.3) * VirtualBox 4.3 doesn't run at all on Mavericks (10.9) because their kernel extensions aren't signed. OS X 10.9 requires signed kexts now. So the changelog where they said "limited" Mavericks support they actually should've said "no support". (UPDATE: Some people are reporting it is working for them on Mavericks. I can't get it to work. YMMV) Based on these two bullet points, I would stick with VirtualBox 4.2 for the time being. The bullet point that says "rewritten VT-x and AMD-V code" is especially vague and could be "super unstable virtual machine manager" just as easily as it can mean "slight performance improvements." So be careful. Other than that, it is good to see VirtualBox have some sort of big release. This is their first major ("4.x") release in over a year. I also want to note that if you are on Mavericks, VMware Fusion works perfectly. As a disclaimer to this sentence though: I make money from Vagrant + VMware users. I'm not trying to advertise that, I just want to state that Vagrant _itself_ is fine. VirtualBox 4.3 doesn't work. VirtualBox 4.2 does. VMware Fusion 5 and 6 does.

whalesalad 13y ago
Thanks a lot for this comment. After upgrading to Mavericks I had to ditch my hacked together and hand-compiled PHP setup, so I converted to Vagrant+Virtualbox. I'd have hated to break that with the upgrade to 4.3 haha.
- jtreminio 13y ago
  I made something for you: https://puphpet.com https://puphpet.com
CJefferson 13y ago
I tried googling for mac os x signed kernel extensions, but couldn't find anything useful. Is this an easy issue to fix (get free key, slap a signature on), or could this be a more serious issue?
- mitchellh 13y ago
  The change is still under NDA. If you sign into your Apple dev account and look up the WWDC talk on OS X kernel extension development, you'll find it within that slide deck. Deep, I know. I also reported the issue to the VirtualBox team many weeks ago and they confirmed the bug and know it exists. It just seems like it wasn't important enough for them to fix prior to release.
  - untog 13y ago
    Honestly, the fact that the change is under NDA seems like reason enough for them to not bother yet. Who knows what NDA violation an open source project could make in discussing how they are going to implement it.
    - glibgil 13y ago
      I know what NDA violation they could make. It is called "NDA violation". It is where you sign an NDA and then you disclose information. Release of source code could be considered a disclosure. Now Apple can go right ahead and do a whole lot of nothing against VirtualBox and Oracle because no one cares. Neither should you. Stop lionizing contract law. It is a civil matter and no big deal almost always and especially when no money has changed hands.
Xylakant 13y ago
> VirtualBox doesn't work. VMware does. I haven't tried Virtualbox 4.3 but Virtualbox 4.2 sort of works on Mavericks. The kernel extensions don't load on boot, but can be loaded manually. I blogged about that here http://asquera.de/development/2013/06/20/vagrant-on-mavericks/ http://asquera.de/development/2013/06/20/vagrant-on-maverick...
- mitchellh 13y ago
  Good catch. I updated that. Thanks!
  - alwillis 13y ago
    It also depends on how your Gatekeeper settings are set; mine are set to "Mac App store and indentified developers". The OS alerted me that the kexts were unsigned, it said it would load them anyway.
chrisrogers 13y ago
Curious. I went ahead and updated, as my use of VirtualBox isn't critical to my workflow. I received warning during install of the unsigned kexts, but the warning stated that they would be loaded anyway. I'm now running vbox 4.3 just fine on Mavericks GM.
aroch 13y ago
Unsigned extensions should run just fine under Mavericks, you'll get an error/warning message on first install but a reboot should load it fine
- Angostura 13y ago
  Does it perhaps depend on your Gatekeeper settings? which could explain the diverse experiences being reported.
  - aroch 13y ago
    It does, Gatekeeper has gotten a little more restrictive as the seeds have gone out (at least compared to where it started). If you don't have "allow me to install whatever I fucking want" checked Gatekeeper will refuse to load unsigned Kexts...which I suppose is ultimately not a bad thing. The majority of users have no idea what a kext is or recognize the security implications of them
yeukhon 13y ago
http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/vmware/known-issues.html http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/vmware/known-issues.html So this is now the only issue left. If I remember correct there used to be multiple issues with VMWare + Vagrant. I just checked now and seems only one left. Correct? I might actually switch to fusion + vagrant on my mac osx if the support is stable.
- mitchellh 13y ago
  That is correct. The adapter is continuously improved and is at a very stable point now.
- mafro 13y ago
  I can attest to the solid Vagrant+VMWare Fusion support. I've been using it for at least the last six months and have not seen a single problem. I've completely stopped using VirtualBox now! Good work mitchellh :)
taternuts 13y ago
Awesome, thanks for the information - I've been using VirtualBox + Vagrant nightly for the last few weeks with a huge smile on my face, I really love that tool. What a pain in the ass it is to get a native RoR dev. environment working...
aioprisan 13y ago
actually, Vagrant works on Mavericks but on every updated version, from beta to beta, I had to remove Vagrant completely and reinstall vagrant fresh.. the kernel extensions don't seem to carry over, but it definitely working on Mavericks

stevenleeg 13y ago

Congrats to the virtualbox team! I still wish they'd consider adding retina support on OS X; that's the one thing keeping me from using it 24/7 :(.

yeukhon 13y ago
I am using 4.2 branch on my retina pro from early 2013. What's the issue? Do you have issue with launch a desktop version of Ubuntu? I normally launch server instance so I am fine. Just curious.
- stevenleeg 13y ago
  It doesn't have retina support, so everything looks pixelated.
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    got it. thanks!

mathrawka 13y ago

If you rely on VirtualBox, I would recommend to hold off on upgrading until you are sure that it will not break your workflow. The big releases tend to have a way of introducing bugs, that although get fixed, can wreck your day if you depend on it.

JimmyL 13y ago
I just upgraded to 4.3 (Win7 host, Sandy Bridge Core i7 processor), and VirtualBox is now complaining that I've got more virtual cores (4) assigned to my guest than I have physical cores (2) on my host. While this is true, this wasn't an issue with 4.2. It still lets me run it, but it's not happy about it. EDIT: Further investigation shows that VirtualBox docs have always said this was a bad thing to do, but didn't used to throw up a warning when you did it anyways.
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  > ... but didn't used to throw up a warning when you did it anyways. This is mentioned in the changelog, FWIW.

icn2 13y ago

I have used virtualbox and vmware player (free for non commercial user ). vmware player gave me much better experience.

snowwindwaves 13y ago
I have used virtualbox extensively and now have had to use VMware workstation 9 and 10 this last month and I much prefer virtual box. One more anecdote!
- sahaskatta 13y ago
  Out of curiosity what is generally your host/guest OSes? Things had gotten pretty buggy with VirtualBox running Ubuntu 13.04 inside a Windows 8 PC. (Wonder if it was just me or others too.)
  - rebootthebox 13y ago
    2 out of 4 my boxes are Win 8 and I haven't noticed anything funny with Ubuntu 13.04. I use Linux guests fairly extensively.
sahaskatta 13y ago
Same here. I had been completely reliant on VirtualBox for ages. About a year or so ago it felt as though advancements slowed down, performance got incredibly slow, and things became buggy. I started using VMWare Player which definitely is a lot more polished, reliable, and way faster in my opinion.
jebblue 13y ago
I've used both for years, I consistently find VirtualBox to provide a much better experience.

walid 13y ago

It is worth noting that if you don't use the new features and running VirtualBox on old hardware there probably is no good reason to upgrade at the moment.

codexon 13y ago

I just installed 4.3 and tried running a directx9 program on XP with 3d acceleration and it caused the VM screen to flicker and not display any content. I hope Vbox will catch up with VMware player on 3d acceleration soon.

pallandt 13y ago
Same issue here, just different Win version. In my case it was easy to solve since I didn't really need 3D acceleration, so I ended up disabling it.

thex86 13y ago

VirtualBox is one of those projects that is a very important part of my daily use. But somehow I feel that it doesn't get much love from the open source community. Is it just me?

autodidakto 13y ago
I don't know the full story, but from what I've heard, it probably involves things like 1) Oracle owns it 2) It requires a non-free compiler to build the BIOS
- slacka 13y ago
  1) It's GPL'd so nothing is stopping you or anyone else from forking it away from Oracle. 2) The Open Watcom compiler is not required to build VirtualBox at all. The actual compiler is free for anyone to download and use.[1] Other people here raised some legitimate points with the build and patch submission process that I also would like to see improved, but yours are just narrow minded prejudice. [1] https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12011 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12011
  - Argorak 13y ago
    VirtualBox is only partially open source and free: For example, USB2.0 and RDP support is non-free. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ Also note that they do openly admit that stopping to release under GPL 2.0 is not planned, but possible and they reserve the right to do so in future.
  - autodidakto 13y ago
    Please tell this to the Debian team (that they're narrow minded and prejudice) because I'd like them to move VB off of contrib (non free) to their free repos.
CptCodeMonkey 13y ago
Vbox's "api" is kind of an abomination. Vagrant succeeds because it parses sometimes non-machine friendly command line executable output.

chum 13y ago

I used virtualbox a lot for work and play, always with a debian guest. While my overall experience was good, there were two gotchas that really annoyed me: 1. When cloning VMs I would always have networking issues. The fix was known and simple (https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/660 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/660) but not intuitive to a casual user. 2. Installing the guest additions (drag-and-drop file support, shared clipboard, basically stuff you really want) as a kernel module can be a huge pain in the ass depending on what kernel you run. I never had any issues with a "stable" 2.x kernel, but with 3.x I had a difficult time finding the correct kernel headers and putting them in the correct place.

hnha 13y ago
some.distros have the guest additions in their repositories, that makes it easier.

riobard 13y ago

“Networking improvements: A new Network Address Translation (NAT) option allows virtual machines to talk to each other on the same host, and communicate with the outside world. ” This feature alone is worth the upgrade.

rcarmo 13y ago

Nice, but a couple of months too late for me. I've switched over to Parallels 9 on the Mac, and it is _much_ faster overall (not to mention better USB support). Also, I highly recommend Vagrant users to look into the vagrant-LXC plugin - that, too, is one heck of a lot faster than using either VirtualBox or VMware providers. I've documented my setup here: http://the.taoofmac.com/space/HOWTO/Vagrant http://the.taoofmac.com/space/HOWTO/Vagrant

pdknsk 13y ago

Maybe someone from the VirtualBox team can explain to me why VirtualBox for Ubuntu has a dependency on acroread-bin.