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VirtualBox KVM Public Release

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Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#141

Post by nonrandomstring »

als0 wrote: post #122
mark_undoio wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - plus the original win of UML was also being able to run virtual instances on a kernel without proper virtualization capabilities. In the early 2000s people used to use UMLs as a hosting platform - they didn't have the same security isolation as a proper VM (or even, necessarily, of a container) though.

How do containers have better security isolation than UML?

When I tinkered with UML I think it was prior to cgroups (2007) [0] so my guess is that escaping the UML instance was easier.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroups

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#142

Post by nodesocket »

First time hearing about Cloud Hypervisor. What's the use for it? I recently built a Windows 11 Pro machine (mostly for gaming) but would like to run a few VMs on it. What's the recommended VM platform these days? Still Hyper-V? I'm a macOS and Linux guy, but begrudgingly using Windows because of games.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#143

Post by markfeathers »

Anyone using VitualBox please be careful about the extension pack. Oracle is very litigous.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/147k6az/oracle_is... https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/d1ttzp/oracle_is_... https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/04/oracle_virtualbox_mer...

We banned virtualbox in our organization since vmware workstation (or virt-manager) is way cheaper than dealing with oracle.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#144

Post by actionfromafar »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #9
viraptor wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page

Is there a connection to User Mode Linux (UML) from around the same time? Or are these completely unrelated projects? I get that running a kernel in the user space provided by another kernel is not really the same as a proper hypervisor, but have never really dug deep into why and what the various tradeoffs are.

I want to know what Linux a386 was. Couldn't ever really understand what it did.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#145

Post by downsplat »

Reminds me of the bad old days when I regularly had to open a crappy windows 7 in a VM because some minor piece of software would not run on Linux or on the browser. Thankfully I haven't needed to do that in years.

On a more constructive note, this might be really useful for kernel developers, and for big companies using desktop virtualization.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#146

Post by bonton89 »

prmoustache wrote: post #78
bonton89 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about drag'n'drop. Also I've noticed that even when you're aware of the way USB passthrough in virt-manager GUI works that it seems to have some bugs. I'm mostly interested in if I can use virtualbox accelerated video with kvm because virgl3d seems well behind in that area.

ah yes maybe drag'n'drop is not working I have no idea tbh but I don't remember it working reliably in virtualbox and shared folders always worked better in my limited experience.

Shared folders does indeed seem like a weak point for kvm/virt-manager. There's the virtioFS but this is a pretty recent addition that was also recently pretty buggy on Windows.

I'm not even sure what your alternatives were for this before now, I guess everyone was just using samba.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#147

Post by bonton89 »

gonzodaruler wrote: post #72
bonton89 wrote: post #68

Is it possible to use virtualbox's accelerated video adapters with the KVM backend?

Yes. Don't expect too much though. 3D acceleration with Virtualbox is rather flaky (independent of using KVM).

Sure, VMware's is better but even that isn't really a replacement for GPU passthrough unfortunately. What I'd really like is to just get GPU accelerated video decode in the guests.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#149

Post by dehrmann »

downsplat wrote: post #145

Reminds me of the bad old days when I regularly had to open a crappy windows 7 in a VM because some minor piece of software would not run on Linux or on the browser. Thankfully I haven't needed to do that in years. On a more constructive note, this might be really useful for kernel developers, and for big companies using desktop virtualization.

Crappy? Windows 7 was the last good Windows.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#150

Post by tryauuum »

treffer wrote: post #125
ImPleadThe5th wrote: post #32

I'm quite inexperienced with Virtualization. Are there benefits to kernel based virtual machines beyond (what I assume is the primary benefit) performance?

I wouldn't call it kernel based. It's not like this is an in-kernel emulation. I would stick with hardware virtualization. KVM is a userspace API, and kvm-intel/kvm-amd are the drivers for the hardware. You will be using hardware features. That's also why it is in the kernel: nothing but the kernel should have full unlimited access to the CPU to set this up. So you could say it must be in kernel to keep the kernel se…

if in the past they already were using a kernel module then your reply doesn't explain anything.

So they went from using hardware virtualization (provided by intel/amd) with their kernel module to the KVM one. I don't know which benefits it brings

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