Does it support extra features from VirtualBox (machine snapshots, suspend&resume, multiple monitors, shared clipboard...)?
VirtualBox KVM Public Release
41–50 of 205 posts
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#42I've contributed in the past to libvirt in order to support some Virtualbox features because some of our customers used VBox.
It would have been handy to have this in the past, and have all of our customers use some KVM VMs ;)
Congrats for the work!
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#43Does it support extra features from VirtualBox (machine snapshots, suspend&resume, multiple monitors, shared clipboard...)?
It does.
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#44How does it enhance security and performance of virtualized environments compared to the standard VirtualBox kernel module?
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#45Too little, too late. VirtualBox is completely obsolete. And the fact that it is owned by Oracle doesn't help.
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#46Any chance this gets upstreamed?
Oracle already had an unfinished and broken KVM backend in the code that was not exposed. Whether they incorporate this polished KVM backend is anyone's guess at this point.
How is it broken ? I used it for a day recently (from ubuntu repo, windows guest) and it worked ok.
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#47Finally! 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…
Great! What guests do you typically run where you see better performance with libvirt/kvm?
Mostly Linux, but also Windows when I had a VFIO passthrough setup. I don't think it's even possible to set it up with Virtualbox to have decent enough performance.
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#48How does it enhance security and performance of virtualized environments compared to the standard VirtualBox kernel module?
Well, KVM is used by Google and AWS and others for their clouds. As such, there are a lot of eyes on KVM code. The vboxdrv kernel module that provides the same functionality in vanilla VBox definitely has fewer people looking at it. It also has anti-features, such as code upload from the userspace VirtualBox process to the kernel. This is also the largest security issue with vanilla VBox, because a lot of emulation code runs directly in the kernel.
From a performance perspective, it's a bit more complicated. KVM has support for modern virtualization features (Intel APICv, AMD AVIC, etc) that vanilla VBox lacks. You get these in the VirtualBox/KVM version. On the other hand, vanilla VBox emulates most devices in the kernel (see above). So SATA emulation in vanilla VBox is very fast compared to KVM/Qemu or KVM/VirtualBox for a bit unfair reasons. Modern devices, such as virtio or NVMe, are not as impacted by that.
tl;dr So the performance you get depends on your workload. If it's very interrupt heavy, VirtualBox/KVM will win. If it uses antiquated virtual devices (SATA), vanilla VirtualBox (with vboxdrv) will have an edge.
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oracle already had an unfinished and broken KVM backend in the code that was not exposed. Whether they incorporate this polished KVM backend is anyone's guess at this point.
How is it broken ? I used it for a day recently (from ubuntu repo, windows guest) and it worked ok.
The KVM backend in vanilla VBox cannot be activated without changing the code. If you tried it, you tried the vanilla VBox hypervisor (vboxdrv) instead of KVM.
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#50I am really curious about this.
As a pentester, I run use Linux on my laptop and I spend a lot of time working inside a Kali VM with VirtualBox.
How much performance improvement can we expect with the KVM backend ?