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VirtualBox 6.0 released

virtualbox.org

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Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you live in a one-party state, secretly record them and then if Oracle threatens to sue, show them the recording and remind them of promissory estoppel. (IANAL!)

Not really promissory estoppel, which can enforce a promise if you detrimentally relied on it. It's not really to your detriment to use the product for free, so it's not a perfect fit (unless maybe your company hired someone to administer the VMs, specifically based on his VirtualBox experience?). Some other possibilities would be the parol evidence rule (verbal exchanges between the contracting parties and their eff…

...and this is why I'm not a lawyer.

Thank you!

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#162
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux only by the looks of things though.

The equivalent on macOS would leverage Hypervisor.framework, like xhyve or Veertu. https://github.com/machyve/xhyve https://veertu.com/anka-technology/#hypervisor

Docker for Mac has moved from VirtualBox to the built-in hypervisor.

I have the impression that causes some pain when it starts eating away battery faster than the monitor can charge the laptop.

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#163
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The equivalent on macOS would leverage Hypervisor.framework, like xhyve or Veertu. https://github.com/machyve/xhyve https://veertu.com/anka-technology/#hypervisor

Docker for Mac has moved from VirtualBox to the built-in hypervisor. I have the impression that causes some pain when it starts eating away battery faster than the monitor can charge the laptop.

Hmm, never noticed that; to the contrary, in my practice, Docker's VM eats CPU less aggressively than VirtualBox's.

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#164
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux only by the looks of things though.

The equivalent on macOS would leverage Hypervisor.framework, like xhyve or Veertu. https://github.com/machyve/xhyve https://veertu.com/anka-technology/#hypervisor

Last time I tried, reasonably recent kernels (like 4.15 or so) failed to boot under Veertu, for no apparent reason.

Have they improved?

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#165
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might surprise you but neither of these 2 are bugs. VirtualBox shared folders simply don't offer the guarantees of a local filesystem. They are not a local filesystem, they are network drives mounted as NFS, with the abysmal support and quirk that comes with that. sendfile() doesn't work on network drives. it never did. the host is not aware of changes made to the remote filesystem from another host. it cannot s…

But from our point of view (the end user), it feels like a bug with VirtualBox because this problem doesn't exist when using VMWare or Hyper-V. I used a VMWare Player driven VM as a primary Linux development environment for full time web development for literally 4 years straight and I encountered the issue 0 times, but with VirtualBox I encountered the issue in 1 day. Maybe it's not technically a bug with VirtualBox…

You're right that it's a major UX hurdle. But it's not a bug in an advertised feature. Not a technical oversight, not a glitch.

Yes, vboxfs is very restrictive, but then again, the whole cross platform virtualization is a very thin curtain of magic over the nasty differences behind.

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For tools like Vagrant, not at all. They are very useful if you want to attach USB devices directly to the VM, use the built-in webcam and so on, but I've used VirtualBox for years without installing the extension once.

USB 2.0 and 3.0 are not fully supported without the extension pack.

Which again are irrelevant for the common “just for Vagrant” use case.

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#167

Is anyone using VirtualBox on the desktop? Specifically, to run Linux/macOS/Windows guests on a macOS host? Would you recommend it? Or is the best option VMware Fusion, Parallels, or something else?

I routinely run my "home" Linux desktop on a macOS host.

Pretty nice for me: I got a full-res retina screen (needs a command from host on a VM restart), changed the dpi to taste, and now have compact and crisp UI under Xfce.

I use the open-source guest additions installed by my distro's package manager (void linux), and not the Oracle-provided extensions. They work fine for time sync, clipboard sharing, file sharing, and for hi-res screen (I run 1:1 pixels, no scaling, obviously).

Saving machine state and then restoring it in 10-15 seconds is pretty nice, comparable to normal laptop hibernation mode.

What does not work well is OpenGL acceleration. That is, it sort of works, but sometimes produces visual problems that only a reboot of the VM can fix. So I run with GL acceleration disabled, and thus many nice compositor effects turned off for performance.

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#168
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know of any public references, but I can confirm this is happening to government entities as well. Oracle is being extremely aggressive and mounting what is essentially a phishing campaign against organizations that it sees accessing the extension download page. They are e-mailing employees directly and asking them to contact Oracle.

>Oracle is being extremely aggressive and mounting what is essentially a phishing campaign against organizations that it sees accessing the extension download page. They are e-mailing employees directly and asking them to contact Oracle. You have a very broad definition of "phishing".

> They are e-mailing employees directly and asking them to contact Oracle

That would certainly look a lot like phishing

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#169
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal anecdote: They came after us, since the extension phones home and they could track it to our ASN. Asked us for an audit of all installs of VB. The idea was that they wanted to then charge us big money for a corporate license. Instead, IT banned it enterprise-wide. Which is sad, because we like it for Vagrant. We've since started moving all of our developer stuff to OpenShift, so we're not totally up a creek.

I have a devops guy trying to push me to use Vagrant at the moment, but I am aware of these issues with virtualbox. I was thinking about using one of the lxc shims, but now you have me curious, how useful is openshift in that "I want to spin local vms up for testing" approach? I thought it was much more geared to server and not workstation, as opposed to vagrant. Of course others are right, virt-manager is probably a…

So OpenShift (or OKD) is just Redhat's Kubernetes platform. If your dev team isn't already in a docker-like workflow, it's going to be a hard sell. I've found many devops-y people love to be able to SSH into the environment to change code as it runs, and that's not possible with an environment like this.

You can spin up KVMs in OpenShift, but I have the feeling it's not going to be quite what you're looking for. I suppose it's all going to be a matter of what workflow is most comfortable for your devops people. If you have an OpenStack install, Vagrant can control those AND they can login and poke around.

Also FYI virt-manager is deprecated in RHEL 8, and is superceded by Cockpit.

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#170
Virtualbox is not your only option if you want to use Vagrant. Vagrant has decent plugins for qemu (vagrant-libvirt) and lxd (vagrant-lxd)

Make sure you get your KVM, Qemu and libvirt setup right and run:

    vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt
    vagrant init generic/ubuntu1804
    vagrant up --provider=libvirt
You can export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=libvirt to avoid passing --provider=libvirt to vagrant all the time.

vagrant-lxd is less mature but just as useful, especially when you need to run stuff with erratic RSS graphs.

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