Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

3D support for X11 guests

virtualbox.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 74 posts

Re: 3D support for X11 guests

#11

Post by XorNot »

emeraldd wrote: post #10
hedora wrote: post #9

Without 3d support, basically no-one can use virtualbox, so is the dilemma whether to kill the project or not? (This is a serious question--what can possibly be more important to average virtualbox users than having a working desktop environment? Virtualbox has always occupied the desktop virtualization niche, so I'm trying to figure out what has changed...)

I use Virtualbox daily without ever using a desktop environment in the VM. It's very useful in headless form for development machines when working locally.

I find this baffling when KVM is much more amenable to being scripted from the command line.

Re: 3D support for X11 guests

#12

Post by cookiecaper »

tcrews wrote: post #2

Never worked well and we turn it off in our Vagrant boxes. If you need 3D support in a VM on your workstation, use VMware Workstation 12... it's awesome (but Vagrant support sucks).

Same. These days, I usually use my Linux system in a Windows host with raw-disk passthrough and VirtualBox. I've tinkered with the 3D acceleration but all it's done is break things for me.

My experiments with VMWare show that while it does well on some things that VBox struggles with, it has its own areas of weakness/slowness, essentially making it a wash.

When I redo my system in the next few months, I plan on doing a Xen setup with GPU passthrough to Windows and then using Linux in parallel instead of hosted out of VBox.

Re: 3D support for X11 guests

#14

Post by BuuQu9hu »

XorNot wrote: post #11
emeraldd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Virtualbox daily without ever using a desktop environment in the VM. It's very useful in headless form for development machines when working locally.

I find this baffling when KVM is much more amenable to being scripted from the command line.

Vagrant. Many of us still have and use Vagrant.

Re: 3D support for X11 guests

#15

Post by ChristianBundy »

hamburglar wrote: post #5

I don't understand how this is a "dilemma." It's like saying, "on one hand, I really need to mow my lawn. On the other hand, I really don't want to . It's a real dilemma!"

I think it's more akin to a free lawn mowing service that's having trouble cutting new types of grass.

It's like saying "On one hand, we really want to cut your grass for free. On the other hand, cutting new types of grass takes a significant amount of time that we don't have."

I get that it's really nice to have your cake and eat it too, but unless you're paying for said-cake I'm not sure that your critique is very accurate.

Re: 3D support for X11 guests

#16

Post by sandGorgon »

bhouston wrote: post #8
tcrews wrote: post #2

Never worked well and we turn it off in our Vagrant boxes. If you need 3D support in a VM on your workstation, use VMware Workstation 12... it's awesome (but Vagrant support sucks).

We switched to lxc for vagrant, it is a amazing both for GPU support, speed of startup, and low memory usage. Would never go back to running full VMs via VB or VMware. You could wait years for some 3D support in VB, or you could just side step the problem and go with lxc.

Could you talk about how do you set this up (and how you use it) ?

I'm assuming that this is LiNux only.

Re: 3D support for X11 guests

#17

Post by hamburglar »

ChristianBundy wrote: post #15
hamburglar wrote: post #5

I don't understand how this is a "dilemma." It's like saying, "on one hand, I really need to mow my lawn. On the other hand, I really don't want to . It's a real dilemma!"

I think it's more akin to a free lawn mowing service that's having trouble cutting new types of grass. It's like saying "On one hand, we really want to cut your grass for free. On the other hand, cutting new types of grass takes a significant amount of time that we don't have." I get that it's really nice to have your cake and eat it too, but unless you're paying for said-cake I'm not sure that your critique is very…

Don't get me wrong; I'm not demanding they fix this bug. They don't have the resources to prioritize it, and hey, that's their prerogative. It's a free product, after all. I just think calling it a dilemma is weird and makes it sound like there's some counter-argument to fixing the problem beyond "we don't have time."

Re: 3D support for X11 guests

#19

Post by SteveNuts »

XorNot wrote: post #11
emeraldd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Virtualbox daily without ever using a desktop environment in the VM. It's very useful in headless form for development machines when working locally.

I find this baffling when KVM is much more amenable to being scripted from the command line.

While I do love KVM, it takes a lot more to get running properly than installing Virtualbox and Vagrant and being up and running with a whole ecosystem of every type of prebuilt box you could imagine.

Re: 3D support for X11 guests

#20

Post by Dylan16807 »

hedora wrote: post #9

Without 3d support, basically no-one can use virtualbox, so is the dilemma whether to kill the project or not? (This is a serious question--what can possibly be more important to average virtualbox users than having a working desktop environment? Virtualbox has always occupied the desktop virtualization niche, so I'm trying to figure out what has changed...)

It depends on the window manager. From my experience recently, lightdm without acceleration is snappier than cinnamon with acceleration.
Post reply on HN