Oracle has released Virtualbox 5.0. Major improvements include: Paravirtualization support for modern Windows and Linux guests, xHCI controller to support USB 3.0 devices, Improved Drag & Drop support, Disk image encryption, Headless and Detachable start option, and numerous UI enhancements.
Is it open now, or they still use some closed blob to enable USB support?
Edited 2015-07-09 18:12 UTC
No. Both the EHCI and xHCI controllers require the PUEL Extension they provide. This also goes for the new Disk Encryption.
From the source:
USB 2.0/3.0 is currently enabled for this virtual machine. However, this requires the %1 to be installed. Please install the Extension Pack from the VirtualBox download site or disable USB 2.0/3.0 to be able to start the machine.
Edited 2015-07-09 18:36 UTC
salgau_catalin,
That’s a shame. I’ve found the virtual USB passthrough to be a useful feature – Kali will run inside virtuabox using a physical Wifi adapter. This is great for diagnosing WiFi networking problems without a separate machine!
The problem is sometimes the host will crash when I make use of virtualbox’s usb redirection within the guest, which shouldn’t really ever happen. Unfortunately the problem seems to be with the binary blobs, so I can’t even patch it.
Edited 2015-07-10 01:48 UTC
Heh, no dice. It’s really annoying and I don’t get why they can’t open it. I’m waiting for KVM to become more usable with graphics acceleration, then I’ll stop using VirtualBox, because all these blobs really have no good reason to exist there.
shmerl,
There’s been repeated talk of this feature over the years, but progress always seems to stall; the lack of developers keeps virtual GFX acceleration under KVM in permanent stasis.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/105516/3d-acceleration-under-kvm
http://www.spice-space.org/page/PlannedFeatures
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM5NDg
Honestly this would be right up my alley, it involves the low level tech stuff I enjoy working on. If only someone would be willing to pay me for it since I couldn’t afford to do it for free.
Heh, I think you just figured out why development stalls.
darknexus,
No kidding. Some people are fortunate enough to work for a company that is willing to contribute to open source projects. But most of us do not and we still have to make a living somehow. Personally I’m forced to take on projects from clients who pay weather I like the projects or not.
Businesses generally don’t want to pay for things like low level graphics visualization in KVM. While some of us could benefit from it, few if any of us are willing to pay.
Yeah, that Spice driver looked promising, but the progress is very slow. May be it can be crowdfunded? I’d surely contribute to such project.
Edited 2015-07-12 04:44 UTC
shmerl,
Interesting idea. I’ve submitted code & patches and helped debug open source projects, even once for Qemu, but I’ve never been paid before so I don’t know how it would work.
I just took a look at kickstarter to check for precedence for this sort of thing. I don’t really see anything like it pop out. While there are open source projects making use of crowdfunding, in this particular case though it would be working on patches rather than a whole project.
Also, since I’m not working for RedHat, there’s no guarantee that it would be merged. Nobody wants a fork, so I assume they’d need to be involved too.
Edited 2015-07-12 13:04 UTC
I contributed for a few open source efforts through crowdfunding.
Example: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/make-diaspora-installation-one-st…
Edited 2015-07-12 16:29 UTC
shmerl,
I’m intrigued. For some reason I’m still having trouble finding more examples that would help paint a better picture of the typical expectations and compensation for this type of work.
Open source project developers generally need to continue supporting their work, otherwise there’s a big risk of abandonment. My understanding isn’t clear how this would work in a crowdfunded model where there are set milestones and deliverables – how does long term maintenance fit in there?
Not sure. It usually works for reaching certain concrete goal. You can’t guarantee further development beyond that goal with limited funds really. But if that goal is an important milestone on its own, it can be worth supporting.
I.e. it might be much harder for example to reach some basic working level in that Spice driver, than adding more features on top of that further. So that basic level can be a milestone for which you could gather funding for example.
I absolutely love VirtualBox, i use it both at home and in the office, very reliable, I’ve really hammered my PC’s with it and it just keeps going.
Looking forward to stretching this release a bit
Been looking for to drag and drop for a long time, one of the only features i miss from the virtual pc days
Starting in Headless or Detachable mode is finally a thing.
It was kind of ridiculous that I had to keep a window open for a machine I was just going to ssh into.
Actually, VB has supported headless start for quite a time. You had to hold the shift key while choosing to run a VM.
What???
All of those searches, and I never ran across that. Everything usually mentioned starting the machine from the command line.
Flatland_Spider,
I just tried it now, and holding shift results in no GUI being available whatsoever. Neither of these two extremes are really acceptable IMHO. Anyone know if there is a secret way to toggle the GUI window as needed?
A logical GUI designer would have made it possible to select a VM in the manager and “Show” it from there. Conversely one should also be able to close the window without stopping the VM. When you close a window, there’s already a dialog prompting to “Save the machine state”, “Send the shutdown signal”, “Power off the machine”. The omission of “Continue running in background” or “Minimize to System Tray” seems obtuse to me. MS VirtualPC doesn’t have this problem.
Otherwise the VirtualBox GUI is extremely nice, but the glaring omission of such trivial features annoys me all the time. Using RDP/VNC instead of the VirtualBox manager to access VMs would be a workaround, but it seems stupid to have to use RDP just so that we can close the GUI windows.
You mean GUI to attach images, “connect/disconnect” cables to network adapters etc.? It is available via VM settings. I agree this is not the most elegant solution.
It’s also avaialble via the icons in the status bar and “Devices” in the menu bar.
jpkx1984,
It’s not quite what I meant. My gripe is that you can’t open and close the VM interaction window at will without stopping the VM – like you can with other VM managers. It clutters the task bar and alt-tab, etc.
There are no answers on SO, and it’s been an open ticket for 7 years already:
https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2597
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26780280/hide-virtualbox-window-…
Version 5 fixes all of these problems. With a headless or detachable start start, closing the window now has a “Continue Running the Background” option, and the start buttons turns into a “Show” button.
Flatland_Spider,
How about that, you are right!! That’s something I’ve wanted for a long time now
Edit: Playing with it for a few minutes, but I’m baffled why “detachable state” can’t be selected by default. Do we have to explicitly select the small arrow beside “Start” and click on “Detachable Start” every single time? I have no idea why they make this more cumbersome than it needs to be…
Edited 2015-07-10 14:09 UTC
The bigger question is: have they closed the performance gap between VirtualBox and VMWare’s offerings? Did they clean up the code in their Linux kernel modules?
I’ve been using their RC’s and I have to say, the performance vs VMware is horrible.
Been trying to get a good Linux VM set up on my work provided Macbook Pro (hate OS X) and VMware irritates me in that the drivers for it are always such a pain to get working (In both Fedora 22 and Arch Linux) Other issue I had was that when I’d leave the VM running for a long time, it’d start to cause a bunch of page faults and eventually cause everything to freeze, with slowly building intermittent freezes in the mean time.
So I switched to virtualbox, the performance there is horrible in general, but seemed overall more usable due to no freezing (seems that the new Gnome-Shell’s notifications popping down from the top caused VMWare to freak). I haven’t fully gotten Fedora 22 working in VMware with drivers yet, but under Arch Linux is where I’d’ get freezes.
Virtualbox’s drivers on the other hand worked mostly out of the box. Vmware SHOULD, but instead I have the secondary display telling me that the drivers aren’t installed (openvm-tools are installed by default but apparently don’t have 100% of the features/performance that vmware-tools do)
I’ve run into problems with VMware’s openvm-tools in the past as well. It’s best to install the version that is provided by the product, or just rely on whatever is in the kernel out of the box.
Stock RHEL/CentOS 6+ and Fedora should already have the openvm-tools integrated. I haven’t messed around with VMware for a while, but I was pleasantly surprised when most of the GUI features just worked on a vanilla install and didn’t need to install the VMware tools.
It’s really a shame that the openvm-tools don’t work that well, and/or VMware’s drivers are such a mess. I had high hopes for them, and at the prices they charge, you would think they could devote a little bit of time to sorting things out.
If you hate OS X so much, just run Linux native.