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The VirtualBox virtualization drivers have serious issues. They're written so poorly that they're notorious for causing kernel panics on linux. The kernel devs
by chjj 13y ago
The VirtualBox virtualization drivers have serious issues. They're written so poorly that they're notorious for causing kernel panics on linux. The kernel devs consider your kernel tainted if you load the virtualbox modules.
I've crashed so hard using virtualbox that I didn't even get a kernel panic, just a box that wouldn't even respond to alt+sysrq.
On top of this, I personally prefer QEMU because it doesn't come with a clunky GUI.
- octopus 13y agoTo be fair, VirtualBox runs flawlessly on OSX and Windows. I've also used VirtualBox without problems on Ubuntu. What Linux distribution you use ?
- gtaylor 13y agoI've had Ubuntu 12.04 guests crash hard (like the commenter mentioned) on OSX and Linux hosts with VirtualBox.
- octopus 13y agoProbably has something to do with the 3D acceleration Unity needs. In my case (MacBook Air 2013 with 8GB of RAM I run Ubuntu 12.04.4 without a problem).
- gtaylor 13y agoMy installs are headless, no 3D accel or Unity needed. As originally mentioned, the VBox kernel modules are of poor quality. You may or may not trigger an edge case in your daily use, with or without a desktop environment.
- raverbashing 13y agoThis also may happen if you have another virtualization driver installed (even kvm)
- chjj 13y agoArch. But I've also had virtualbox crash on Debian testing. It's a mess.
- heywire 13y agoI personally had a terrible time using VirtualBox on a Lenovo T420 running Windows 7 x64 about 2 years ago. I was having frequent blue screens, so Lenovo sent out a tech to swap the motherboard. The issue persisted, and after some time, I noticed that it seemed to always occur when I had multiple VMs running. The problem went away when I migrated to VMware Workstation.
- mbreese 13y agoAnecdotally, I've had issues on OSX with VirtualBox, so much so that I switched to VMWare Fusion on Mac hosts...
- neckro23 13y agoVirtualBox is the only app I've ever seen kernel-panic OSX. Twice.
- colechristensen 13y agoThere's a lot of bad information here. Your kernel is tainted whenever you insert non-GPL-compatible modules, it has nothing to do with the quality of the software. VirtualBox is perfectly usable without the GUI.
- awda 13y agoThis is also bad information. Kernel taint is a bitmap that represents a number of things: - Proprietary software (non-gpl-compatible, as you say. ex: vmware) - Crap (drivers/staging) - Out-of-tree modules (virtualbox) - whether the kernel has hit a BUG already - ... - lots of stuff VirtualBox taints the kernel because it is out-of-tree, not because it is GPL-incompatible. Why is a GPL compatible kernel module(s) not merged yet? Because the code quality is crap.
- Karunamon 13y agoVBox was explicitly marked as tainted due to issues it caused, not some licensing philosophy. https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317 https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317
- chjj 13y agoIncorrect. The kernel devs specifically cited the quality of the drivers when adding it to the taint list. Check the mailing list if you don't believe me. https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317 https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317 The number of bug reports we get from people with virtualbox loaded are truly astonishing. It's GPL, but sadly that doesn't mean it's good. Nearly all of these bugs look like random corruption. (corrupt linked lists, corrupt page tables, and just plain 'weird' crashes). And the no-GUI, geared-towards-commandline, doesn't-have-directories-with-spaces type stuff is just my personal preference, as I've already said.