Honest questions:
How does this work in licensing terms? If VB foss enough?
Do you expect Oracle to merge this?
If oracle doesn’t merge this, will you keep on maintaining it, potentially forking VirtualBox?
VirtualBox KVM Public Release
51–60 of 205 posts
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#52I 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 ?
It depends on your setup and workload. On a recent Intel CPU, our performance dashboard shows +10% for some benchmarks. It's hard to make a general statement though.
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#53As a note, the first character of your COPYING file in the repo seems to be typo-d. ;)
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can also setup VFIO in VirtualBox/KVM. We haven't polished it yet though. You can check the video here to see GPU virtualization in action:
https://www.cyberus-technology.de/products/hypervisor (Don't mind the English, we are not native speakers. :)
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#55I 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 ?
If you don't mind, I have a specific question regarding this setup. I've been looking into getting into pentesting, mostly for fun. I decided on messing around with HackTheBox as a starting point. Seeing as you need to connect to their VPN, it seems like a good idea to me to separate this activity from my personal network.
Which networking setup do you use for your pentesting VM? Ideally, I'd want a setup where the VM can access the internet (and therefore the HTB VPN), but not anything inside my local network. But I don't quite know how I could achieve that, at least in a way where I'd trust it to be reliable. Maybe the whole idea's a bit too paranoid to be practical in general, I don't know, so I'd love an expert opinion on this :)
Usually, I'd be using QEMU, but I'd be fine with using VirtualBox for this case if it includes something that makes this easier.
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#56As a note, the first character of your COPYING file in the repo seems to be typo-d. ;)
Ooops. Will fix. :) Thanks!
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#57If I already have a headless debian hypervisor using KVM / QEMU in place running multiple debian VMs, can I now use Virtual Box to manage / tweaks the config on those? And if so is there anyway to do it without having to install a window manager, etc. on the hypervisor?
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#58Honest questions: How does this work in licensing terms? If VB foss enough? Do you expect Oracle to merge this? If oracle doesn’t merge this, will you keep on maintaining it, potentially forking VirtualBox?
>How does this work in licensing terms? If VB foss enough?
It's as FOSS as the VirtualBox open source edition.
> Do you expect Oracle to merge this?
That would be nice, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Oracle gonna Oracle.
> If oracle doesn’t merge this, will you keep on maintaining it, potentially forking VirtualBox?
We don't intend to fork VirtualBox. VBox has a somewhat modular architecture where you can plug-in different hypervisor backends. That's what we did. It's not as modular, but our changes to core VirtualBox code is very small.
As far as our plans go, we are pretty open at this point. We are very interested to get to know people that find this useful!
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#59I'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!
Thank you!
Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The intention is to have this under the same license as the VBox open source release. If there is a way to clarify this more on the Github page, please advise. :)
Thanks for the clarification, that’s really helpful. I think a paragraph under a “License” header in the README just reiterating what you said in that reply would be pretty clear. I’m sure some people would make the assumption that it’s under the same license as the upstream package but in some environments absolutely clarity around licenses is really appreciated.
Ok. We'll try to clarify the situation in the README. Thanks for the feedback!