51–60 of 74 posts
Switch from vb to lxc/docker and you get great GPU driver support, even CUDA.
Really? I was at one point trying to get GPU passthrough working with LXC and I could never get programs to actually run. Ubuntu 16.04, CUDA 7.5 or maybe 8.0, and a cheap GTX 730. Maybe I'll have to try again. I was also trying this so that I could run my desktop environment in a container too.
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Really? I was at one point trying to get GPU passthrough working with LXC and I could never get programs to actually run. Ubuntu 16.04, CUDA 7.5 or maybe 8.0, and a cheap GTX 730. Maybe I'll have to try again. I was also trying this so that I could run my desktop environment in a container too.
There is no passthrough in LXC, because it is containerization, not virtualization. You are running the same kernel and kernel modules for both systems.
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...)
> Without 3d support, basically no-one can use virtualbox What? I can only laugh at such a statement Don't use hyped up desktop managers that need 3D to work.
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I find this baffling when KVM is much more amenable to being scripted from the command line.
Have you ever used VBoxManage?
As a light user of virtualbox, I get the impression using anything but the gui is really hard compared to other virtualization tools.
For instance, auto-starting raw-disk vms at boot on windows is a pain, and hyper-v is free. Its only real downside is lack of gui support for linux guests.
Similarly, you need to stand up separate backup infrastructures for your desktop and virtualbox, or you will be told "you're doing it wrong" when you try to restore.
I guess I could try to write a script to get a crash-consistent export of running virtualbox vms, but the host file system (btrfs, zfs, etc) already does an adequate job of that, so this is just useless administrative overhead and disk space waste from my point of view.
Anyway, when win8 came out, virtualbox couldn't handle the new start menu, and windows guest vdi was my only remaining use case for it at the time.
It is a shame, VirtualBox was my go-to vm solution for years, specifically for its debian/ubuntu host support (unlike vmware) and good desktop guest support (unlike all the other options).
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...)
Why do you need 3d acceleration for using a system? GUIs work perfectly without any 3D acceleration. Are you planing on playong games? If so it is not a good idea in any VM.
Anyway, most engineers at work use unity because it is the default, and it is a non-starter without hardware acceleration. We site-licensed vmware, and it seems to work OK.
The last time I checked, the second most common choice is fvwm. It sorta works out of the box and isn't unity. Also, it can run on the big server VM's, unlike unity (there is no 3d acceleration in the server kvm instances...)
Another common choice is to do everything via console, productivity be damned. (There are some highly productive console users, but they tend to put linux on their laptops on day one anyway)
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 have fine desktop environments without 3D. Maybe I'm just totally old-school, but I've never even felt the need for 3D on physical machines. But then, I use VMs mainly with VPN chains and Tor, for isolation and compartmentalization. If I really needed a 3D desktop environment, I'd use a dedicated box, and route through whatever anonymization path needed, using another box as multi-VM router.
But then, I spend most of my time in vim and localhost web pages.
I hope they get the help they are asking for- I wish I could do it. I think it's a great program and it would be great if it were here for a while.
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> Without 3d support, basically no-one can use virtualbox What? I can only laugh at such a statement Don't use hyped up desktop managers that need 3D to work.
My personal laptop (1 GHz celleron) doesn't even have graphics drivers compiled and just uses the efi framebuffer. It's really great! It runs cool and performs well, software graphics are underrated. Just don't run ridiculous stuff like GNOME that's full of crazy animations every time you do something simple
This is with firefox (they also broke 3d acceleration in linux); chrome is OK, and so is firefox if I force enable video acceleration and ignore the severe visual artifacts.
FWIW, Chrome is still a bit sluggish on a 12 core xeon with no GPU, but it is usable (unlike Firefox on the same VM).
Anyway, I used to get away with no gpu acceleration on my laptop, but it became untenable in ~ dec 2016. It still sorta works on the server-side web browser.
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Have you ever used VBoxManage?
I've tried to use VBoxManage, but mostly to no avail. I have some full-system backups with not-exported virtualbox vm's in them, and usually have to hand edit a bunch of undocumented xml to make them start. I guess vagrant makes this sort of thing better, somehow, but I'm moving everything I possibly can to docker, and then I'll deal with the remaining desktops using some other technology (maybe vagrant, maybe not).…
I've used VBoxManage to create, manage and control VMs on remote headless hosts. And work with VRDC desktops. Easy.
Backup/restore of host system should have nothing to do with VirtualBox. It's just files. But then, I use Debian hosts. For backups, I tend to use LUKS-encrypted SSDs via USB, and just copt the full VM folder. Works perfectly.
Obvious question, why not just run an X11 server on the host? Perhaps Oracle and Microsoft (WSL) can collaborate on supporting an X11 server (ones already exist) for Windows 10.
It works great, modulo 3d acceleration. If I remember right, cut and paste work well, so that (plus a file share for Downloads) gets rid of the need to run a web browser in Linux.
Similarly, it can use the windows wm to manage the x11 windows, so you automatically bypass the linux compositor.
[edit: Also, Hyper-V is extremely fast in this type of setup, because they focus on server performance, and this workload looks like any other network/io intensive server]