Review: InnoTek’s VirtualBox

Submitted by liquidat 2007-02-13 OS News 17 Comments

“Almost a month ago InnoTek, the co-developer of VirtualPC, released their Virtual Machine as Open Source. The software was formerly not targetted at desktop users, but that changed when it was released under the GPL. This review tries to shed some light on the question if VirtualBox can get some market share between Vmware and Qemu.”

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Thom Holwerda

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17 Comments

2007-02-13 4:24 pm

biffuz
Why people always talk of Qemu as a virtual machine? It’s not! It’s an emulator. It can’t get “market share” of VMWare, Xen, Parallels or VirtualBox.

It’s like saying that trains can get some market share of cars.

2007-02-13 4:29 pm

vermaden
qemu is both virtualizer and emulator.

It only depends how You use it.

without kqemu: emulator

with kqemu: virtualizer

from

2007-02-13 4:34 pm

biffuz
The last time I tried it wasn’t. Oh, ok.

2007-02-13 7:03 pm

TaterSalad
If you really wanted to score some points you could explain the difference between a virtual machine and an emulator. I use the two terms interchangeably to mean the same thing. If it runs another OS then to me its an emulator or its a virtual machine. I think of qemu and vmware player as pretty much the same thing in that they both let me run a different OS within Windows.

2007-02-13 7:38 pm

systyrant
How about this. A virtual machine emulates the actual hardware and an emulator emulates only the OS. If that holds water then a virtual machine is an emulator, but an emulator can’t be a virtual machine.

2007-02-13 8:05 pm

galvanash
An emulator can run software designed for one CPU architecture on a different one (i.e. run Windows x86 on top of OSX PPC). It does this by emulating ALL aspects of the hardware (including the CPU itself).

A VM can be an emulator, but it doesnt have to be. It can also be software that presents multiple pieces of software (guest OSs) with what looks to them like individual distinct machines. If all of the sofware uses the same underlying CPU architecture, this can be done without requiring that the entire CPU be emulated. This is MUCH more efficient.

2007-02-13 8:26 pm

bakery2k
An emulator is an implementation of the entire hardware of a machine (eg a PC) in software. Every single feature of the “guest” machine has to be written on code (in C, for example). This allows for maximum portability, since porting to a different machine is no different to porting any other C program. Unfortunately due to the complexity of most CPUs, and the x86 in particular, emulators tend to be quite slow.

Rather than implementing the x86 CPU in software, a virtual machine takes advantage of the physical x86 CPU to directly execute guest instructions. This gives a considerable performance increase, but at the expense of tying the virtual machine to the x86 architecture. Whilst it could be ported between OSs, an x86 virtual machine could not be ported to run on a physical machine with, for example, a PowerPC CPU. Other than the different approaches to the CPU, a virtual machine emulates other hardware (the video card etc) in exactly the same way as an emulator.

2007-02-13 4:29 pm

archiesteel
Does anyone know if you can use physical disks instead of virtual disks?

Is it possible to run a Windows guest OS with it? (I imagine so, but I’m wondering about performance…)

2007-02-13 4:37 pm

ambuj123
Well i never felt any significant speed difference between QEMU (with kqemu ) module and vmware so it would be intresting to see how another of theis virtual PC software competes with Likes of qemu and vmware.

Ambuj varshney <http://linuxondesktop.blogspot.com>

2007-02-13 4:45 pm

vermaden
virtualbox is partially based on qemu also.

from

2007-02-13 5:00 pm

stodge
I’ve had reasonable success with VirtualBox. Debian and Ubuntu won’t install as they don’t see the network card. PCLinuxOS installed fine and Fedora probably would have installed if I’d had all four CDs at hand, instead of just the first one. I gave up trying to understand FreeBSD’s installation process.

Performance has been good, though I need to work out how to use a larger screen. Configuring it is fairly easy and I like the interface, instead of resorting to the command line. I don’t think VirtualBox needs daemons running, unlike VMPLayer, which seems to need several processes in the background even though its not running. I’m planning on uninstalling VMPlayer anyway, primarily for that reason.

VB doesn’t yet support booting off an existing Linux installation on my hard disk, but presumably that will come in time.

2007-02-13 5:26 pm

vermaden
I’ve had reasonable success with VirtualBox.

I will also want to try it out but since there is no VirtualBox port to FreeBSD I can only wait.

I run many OSes under qemu, *Linux/WinNT4/Win2k/WinXP/Sco Unixware/ReactOS/*BSD/Solaris, good to know that VirtualBox is not only for *win, like Win4BSD.

I like qemu for its flexibility, You can use command line [which I prefer] or use qemu-launcher(GTK2)/kqemu(QT) to get a GUI.

2007-02-13 6:45 pm

FunkyELF
I got it yesterday. Networking was a little hard. I’m on a Windows XP host with a Gentoo guest. For some reason you can’t ping anything, but you can browse the web and emerge stuff, which is confusing because I use ping to check for network connectivity.

I don’t like how some of the options like whether the network card is plugged in or other things are unavailable unless the OS is shut down.

Also, I find the snapshots confusing. When exiting a running virtual machine and you want to keep the current state it is real fast, but if you want to drop the current state and revert to the last saved one it takes forever. Since the state should be saved I would think it should be fast too but it isn’t.

Another thing is the mouse. It is very fast for me and no way to slow it down.

One last complaint is that for some reason I can’t send ctrl-alt-f1 or ctrl-alt-f2 to get out of the graphical screen and into another login. It says it is supposed to capture the keyboard until you press the right control button. Alt-tab works, but ctrl-alt-delete still goes to the host OS too.

It does look promising though. I hope it gets better.

2007-02-13 6:50 pm

Kroc
Ctrl-Alt-Delete is implemented much lower than normal in Windows XP (so that you can get the task manager in even the most unstable conditions). There is no easy way for a program to override the three finger salute. This is why VMWare Workstation uses Ctrl-Alt-Ins to send the three finger saute to the guest machine instead.

2007-02-14 3:05 am

DeadFishMan
I got it yesterday. Networking was a little hard. I’m on a Windows XP host with a Gentoo guest. For some reason you can’t ping anything, but you can browse the web and emerge stuff, which is confusing because I use ping to check for network connectivity.

I know that this may sound stupid or redundant but have you checked if either the Gentoo guest or the Windows XP host doesn’t have a firewall in place that is dropping/rejecting ICMP packets? It is very likely that something along these lines is causing the problem that you described since you seem to be able to browse the web just fine from the guest OS.

2007-02-14 4:31 pm

FunkyELF
I went to the #qemu channel on freenode and someone there was telling me that the behavior is normal and due to slirp or something like that.

It works fine at home, now the problem I’m having is getting networking to work here at work where we have a proxy in place.

2007-02-15 7:40 am

biffuz
It is a bit OT, but does anyone know if there is a virtual machine for Mac OS X on PPC, to run a PPC guest OS? I know there is MacOnLinux but it is for a Linux host, and MacOnMac seems pretty dead.