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VirtualBox KVM Public Release

cyberus-technology.de

181–190 of 205 posts

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#181

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.

Yeah, any other Windows would have been worse. For me it was crappy because no-one wants to be maintaining a second hardly-used OS on their laptop. You randomly need it once in a blue moon, have to deal with two UIs with their conventions and feels on the same computer, and with copying files between them, and then and of course the first thing it wants to do is download tons of updates. Makes for a crappy experience.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#182
post #180

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.

What if you just ignored Oracle? Do they even have teeth? If they made a download free it should be free. You can't hand someone a banana on the street and then come back 3 months later demanding $1000 for it.

If your organization uses any Oracle software then I'm certain that the organization has agreed to let Oracle audit it for license compliance at any time.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#183
post #19

Finally! Every time I need to run a virtual machine, I choose libvirt because it's more performant and easy to deal with than Virtualbox (no kernel module, etc.), but the GUI choices are pretty terrible. The "best" libvirt GUI is virt-manager and it's very, very buggy and lacking features (i.e. doesn't play nice with HiDPI screens, no way of configuring IPv6, etc.) Many times I have caved and chosen VirtualBox simply…

If you use a network bridge there's no reason to have to configure any IP addresses at all.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#184
post #180

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.

What if you just ignored Oracle? Do they even have teeth? If they made a download free it should be free. You can't hand someone a banana on the street and then come back 3 months later demanding $1000 for it.

Oracle is that awful practices company. Their software audits are a notorious issue, and a good reason to never ever use software from them.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#185

Can someone ELI5 what this is and does it benefit someone like me who occasionally spins up VirtualBox VMs for various OSes?

This only affects anyone that wants to spin up VirtualBox VM's on Linux hosts. I'm not an expert in this field, but my best TL;DR is that VirtualBox and other VMM's (virtual machine monitor) used to ship with their own hypervisors (the thing that let's you run virtual machines). However, now Linux has its own hypervisor/framework (KVM) and now VirtualBox can use KVM to do all the functionalities their own hypervisor…

Thanks! Appreciate it.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#186
post #19

Finally! Every time I need to run a virtual machine, I choose libvirt because it's more performant and easy to deal with than Virtualbox (no kernel module, etc.), but the GUI choices are pretty terrible. The "best" libvirt GUI is virt-manager and it's very, very buggy and lacking features (i.e. doesn't play nice with HiDPI screens, no way of configuring IPv6, etc.) Many times I have caved and chosen VirtualBox simply…

Yeah this has always been a bit of a pain. Since LXD recently launched a web interface that includes graphical console support (plus VM support some time before that, it's not just a container host anymore, it can do both), I have been using that for remote VMs now. But it still has quite a few rough edges, but nicer than libvirt at least.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no project, closed or open has made configuring pcie passthrough easy "GPU passthrough with libvirt qemu kvm" https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GPU_passthrough_with_libvirt_qe... "PCI passthrough via OVMF" https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF : > The Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) is a project to enable UEFI support for virtual machines. Starting with Linux 3.9 and recent versions of QEMU, it…

I don't think that linking two different Wiki's (for different Linux distros) and two different github posts is "easy" compared to VirtualBox's very "fisher price" Next-Next-Next-Done GUI Not saying I prefer one or the other, but it's worth bearing in mind where "the bar" is

FWICS from scanning those resources, there are a few shell commands to wrap with a config parser and an output parser for a GUI

E.g. virt-manager is built with glade XML and Python:

virt-manager/virt-manager//ui/createvm.ui: https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/blob/main/ui/cr...

virt-manager/virt-manager//ui/gfxdetails.ui: https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/blob/main/ui/gf...

virt-manager/virt-manager//ui/hoststorage.ui: https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/blob/main/ui/ho...

virtManager/createvm.py: https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/blob/main/virtM...

virtManager/device/addstorage.py: https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/blob/main/virtM...

virtManager/device/gfxdetails.py: https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/blob/main/virtM...

virtManager/addhardware.py:

  DeviceController.TYPE_PCI

    def populate_controller_model_combo(combo, controller_type): 
https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/blob/135cf17072... https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/blob/135cf17072...

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#188
I'd like to know more about this part:

> A lot of the security features that get built into Windows rely on virtualization. In cases where Windows is already virtualized, additional support from the Hypervisor is needed to enable those features. KVM provides a lot of the needed support to improve Windows’ security in virtualized environments.

What specific features does KVM provide for this? I gather this isn't talking about nested virtualization.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that linking two different Wiki's (for different Linux distros) and two different github posts is "easy" compared to VirtualBox's very "fisher price" Next-Next-Next-Done GUI Not saying I prefer one or the other, but it's worth bearing in mind where "the bar" is

FWICS from scanning those resources, there are a few shell commands to wrap with a config parser and an output parser for a GUI E.g. virt-manager is built with glade XML and Python: virt-manager/virt-manager//ui/createvm.ui: https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/blob/main/ui/cr... virt-manager/virt-manager//ui/gfxdetails.ui: https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/blob/main/ui/gf... virt-manager/virt-mana…

"Locating the GPU": https://clayfreeman.github.io/gpu-passthrough/#locating-the-... :

  for d in /sys/kernel/iommu_groups/*/devices/*; do
    n=${d#*/iommu_groups/*}; n=${n%%/*}
    printf 'IOMMU Group %s ' "$n"
    lspci -nns "${d##*/}"
  done;
iommu.sh gist: https://gist.github.com/Roliga/d81418b0a55ca7682227d57af2778...

iommu_groups.sh: https://github.com/drewmullen/pci-passthrough-ryzen/blob/mas... :

  lspci -nns "${d##*/}"
"PCI passthrough via OVMF > 2. Setting up IOMMU > 2.2 Ensuring that the groups are valid": https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#En... :

> An IOMMU group is the smallest set of physical devices that can be passed to a virtual machine. For instance, in the example above, both the GPU in 06:00.0 and its audio controller in 6:00.1 belong to IOMMU group 13 and can only be passed together. The frontal USB controller, however, has its own group (group 2) which is separate from both the USB expansion controller (group 10) and the rear USB controller (group 4), meaning that any of them could be passed to a virtual machine without affecting the others.

"Exporting your ROM": https://github.com/BigAnteater/KVM-GPU-Passthrough?tab=readm... :

  lspci -vnn
  find /sys/devices -name rom

  # PATH_TO_ROM=

  echo 1 > $PATH_TO_ROM
  mkdir -p /var/lib/libvirt/vbios/
  cat $PATH_TO_ROM > 
  /var/lib/libvirt/vbios/gpu.rom
  echo 0 > $PATH_TO_ROM
"Attaching the GPU" [with `virsh`] https://clayfreeman.github.io/gpu-passthrough/#attaching-the... :

  
    
    
      
    
  
  
    
      
    
  
"Adding your GPU and USB devices to the VM" [with `virt-manager`]: https://github.com/BigAnteater/KVM-GPU-Passthrough?tab=readm...

> 1. Add every PCI device which has to do with your graphics card to the VM.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly what I came to comment. Same thing here, they seemed to hyperfixate on the extension pack which most VBox users would need. We had to get everyone off that as soon as possible. Of course this isn't limited to VBox, but their database as well. Just avoid.

Just noting that USB 2.0/3.0 support no longer requires the extension pack, and the list of features [1] that require the extension pack has been gradually decreasing. It may not be as necessary as it once was. [1]: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing

USB was the only reason I ever had it. I need nothing from the current list.
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