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VirtualBox KVM Public Release

cyberus-technology.de

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Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#73

Post by blitzclone »

madushan1000 wrote: post #70
blitzclone wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

I'm really curious about this, is it gpu para-virtualization or actual VFIO requiring built in support from the gpu hardware?

We have used this with recent Intel GPUs that support SR-IOV. This is what you see in the video on the cyberus website. Intel hasn't managed to upstream the drivers for this yet and you have to piece together things, which is very unpleasant. But we are there to help, if someone wants to use this in a professional setting.

We used to have support for Intel GVT-g GPU virtualization as well, which was more of a software solution. This doesn't work with modern Intel GPUs anymore.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#74

Post by blitzclone »

stephen_g wrote: post #63
frankjr wrote: post #10

Any chance this gets upstreamed?

I’d actually much, much rather see it set up as a proper fork (rebranded etc.), and then the features that Oracle extorts people with in the “free” but not actually free extension pack (like USB pass through) re-implemented and included directly with no ‘extension’ required. Much of the reason I refuse to use Virtualbox for anything is how scummy Oracle is.

Haha. I understand the sentiment. That's a pretty large effort though and needs some funding as well.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#75

Post by [deleted] »

Faelian2 wrote: post #50

I 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 ?

[deleted]

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#77

Post by blitzclone »

peterhull90 wrote: post #69
blitzclone wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

And could one swap between the two backends with the same VM image (.vbox +.vdi) to see which one gave the better performance?

Yes!

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#78

Post by prmoustache »

bonton89 wrote: post #67
prmoustache wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The out-of-the-box performance of Windows in VirtualBox is very good and usually better than virt-manager (Qemu). You can tune Qemu to great performance as well, but it takes some fiddling. VirtualBox is in general very user friendly. I haven't found a significative difference but if you have found one and can tune qemu to same level,why don't you share the xml template of your machine to the world and to upstream'…

Not sure about drag'n'drop. Also I've noticed that even when you're aware of the way USB passthrough in virt-manager GUI works that it seems to have some bugs. I'm mostly interested in if I can use virtualbox accelerated video with kvm because virgl3d seems well behind in that area.

ah yes maybe drag'n'drop is not working I have no idea tbh but I don't remember it working reliably in virtualbox and shared folders always worked better in my limited experience.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#79

Post by gonzodaruler »

qwertox wrote: post #64

So this basically turns VirtualBox into a replacement for virt-manager and virsh? AFAIK VirtualBox does not support PCI passthrough (like GPU), how is this case handled? Since I've moved to QEMU/KVM on Linux I've never looked back at VirtualBox, but I use the latter on Windows and there I'm always remembered of how much nicer and friendlier the GUI is. Edit: I just noticed that VirtualBox has experimental PCI passthr…

There is experimental support for VFIO PCI pass-through with VirtualBox-KVM, even for GPUs. Please have a look at https://www.cyberus-technology.de/products/hypervisor
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