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VirtualBox KVM Public Release

cyberus-technology.de

81–90 of 205 posts

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 softwar…

Thank you for the info. I use AMD consumer GPUs, none of them unfortunately support SR-IOV afaik, there are some developments from google around virtio-gpu(DRM native context) I've been following, I was hoping this was something similar.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#83
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

You can use `VBoxManage --attach-vfio` if you want to experiment with pci passthrough. This is different from the Oracle `pciattach` call and does not require any support from the extension package.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#84
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…

Please evaluate the license of the extension package carefully before using!

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#85

What does this give me that I don't already get from KVM and virt-manager on Linux? Not getting it.

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. Guest integration (drag'n'drop, clipboard), USB passhthrough and audio support is also top-notch in VBox.

Until you want to pass a GPU to the VM

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#86
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…

I thought virt manager was ok but honestly your complaints about it are specific and fair.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#88

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 ?

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 V…

You can probably do this for VirtualBox (and any Linux program) by using tun2socks to create a network interface that routes through a proxy (SOCKS5 if you want UDP support), and then moving that network interface to a new namespace. You can run VirtualBox or any other programs in that new namespace, they don't have to be aware of the proxy at all (since they just see a regular gateway).

https://github.com/xjasonlyu/tun2socks

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#89

With this setup, what is providing the emulated hardware devices? (emulated USB host controller, emulated interrupt controller, etc) Is it still the original set of emulated hardware provided by virtualbox, or is it now whatever KVM provides?

The emulated hardware is basically the same as with stock VirtualBox. Only the interrupt contoller (local APIC) is emulated by KVM.

Re: VirtualBox KVM Public Release

#90

Does it support extra features from VirtualBox (machine snapshots, suspend&resume, multiple monitors, shared clipboard...)?

I do all of those things daily with virt-manager already. Except multiple monitors, although I believe it is supported.

Thanks, it seems to support it (even through it is a bit DIY). Will look into it.
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