
Virtual Box 5.1 - spv
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog
======
StevePerkins
With Oracle's rocky reputation around open source, I'm surprised that
VirutalBox is still going strong and under active development. There doesn't
seem to be any kind of commercial "enterprise version" that they license for
big bucks... what is their incentive for keeping this thing going?

~~~
FireBeyond
It's also made even uglier by the fact that VMware has discontinued Fusion,
and Parallels (at least in the Vagrant, etc, ecosystem) has always been a
second class citizen).

Not to mention that Parallels licensing is a pain. I understand license key
activation as at times a necessary evil but in cases where you are developing
a product for use primarily by developers who may frequently re-install their
computer, could you at least do some form of trivial hardware checksumming? I
had to call support because I'd exceeded five activations of my license. They
reset it, after asking why. Several months later, same situation - this time
they refused to reset the activation counter. Once loyal customer, no longer,
when you refuse to activate software for the purchaser.

Thankfully, Docker et al seem to be making some good strides at making use of
Hyve based virtualization in the OS X realm. I'm excited to see how that
progresses.

~~~
Scarbutt
From where do you get vmware fusion was discontinued?

~~~
kgwgk
At least the people behind it is gone. I was discussed in HN at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978672)

~~~
frostmatthew
> the people behind it is gone

Development switched to different people/teams but that doesn't mean it's not
under active development. Meet the new team:
[http://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2016/07/meet-the-
team.ht...](http://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2016/07/meet-the-team.html)

~~~
kgwgk
Great, I'm glad Fusion is alive.

------
wildpeaks
If you're using Vagrant, stick to 5.0.24 until this issue is closed:
[https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/7411](https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/7411)

~~~
infocollector
Does this have to do with just the version number? Or something more?

~~~
apetresc
There's an open PR to add 5.1 support, and it seems to just be a bit-for-bit
identical copy of the 5.0 code which Vagrant inexplicably requires a separate
driver for:
[https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/pull/7574](https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/pull/7574)

All the heavy-duty OOP-first power of Ruby at their fingertips, and people
still just copy-and-paste massive files to change a version string...

~~~
dmunoz
I only looked very briefly, but yes in this case 5.1 driver hasn't made any
changes other than the version. But doing a quick vimdiff with a few of the
other drivers show that the files have seen some substantial changes over
time, and in some cases the small differences between two versions of a driver
are to work around bugs, whether new or newly identified.

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methehack
There's some negativity around this product on this thread, but honestly I'm
really glad Virtual Box is around and under active development.

I have both an active linux and os x env for dev and I use virtual box to
manage and switch between. It's been super useful, very reliable, fast enough,
and, btw, it's free.

~~~
rpgmaker
Do you just have a vanilla OSX VM installation or do you optimize it in some
way? For me OSX is very slow on vbox on a very decently spec'ed VM. Far from
my experience with Windows guests.

~~~
methehack
My OS X install is native; my linux is vbox. So OS X is the host.

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CoolGuySteve
I'm not sure why, but my Ubuntu image with unity always thinks it should run
at 10fps. I had to hard set the frame rate in compizConfig at 60 fps to get it
to run smoothly.

Putting it here because it took me quite a while to figure out why it was 3D
accelerated but still so slow.

~~~
cptskippy
Any VM I provision seems to be setup by default with 1mb of video memory and
3D Acceleration off. The option to enable 2D Acceleration is greyed out.

The funny thing is that VB complains about this configuration whenever you
load the console.

Have you tried increasing the video memory for the VM or enabling
acceleration?

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mrmondo
Anyone tested to see if the network and disk IO is actually any faster than
before? We found it _very_ slow in the past compared to VMWare Fusion on OSX.

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kelvin0
"... better support for Python 3". Why does VB need to better support a
specific executable, namely python 3? Anyone have more technical details on
this?

~~~
ygra
VirtualBox offers a Python API (among others):
[http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch11.html](http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch11.html).

~~~
kelvin0
OK, Python for using their VM's API. Yes, that rings a bell. However, from the
notes it seemed like something they modified in the VM to better support
python with the guest OS ... did not make sense until. Thanks!

------
christogreeff
Has anyone done performance tests with different versions of VirtualBox? I
often see entries in the changelog relating to "significantly improved
performance".

~~~
PaulKeeble
I did a test for VMWare player verses Virtualbox and its no competition,
VMWare is hands down a lot faster especially on anything GUI. I like what
Virtualbox gives us but the performance is a problem.

~~~
nickjj
I noticed the same thing. VMWare (at least in my experience) runs a GUI in
Unity mode at pretty much the same speed as native for xubuntu guests. I/O
performance over shared folders is really good in VMWare too.

The only problem is VMWare has abandoned Linux guests in Unity mode for newer
releases of VMWare, which likely means you'll be stuck on 7.x and running
older guest versions until the end of time.

For me, VirtualBox's deal breakers are:

\- VBox doesn't support dual monitors in seamless mode while VMWare does.

\- VBox is not capable of running another 64bit OS inside of itself through
virtualization, so using Vagrant inside of VBox is not happening. VMWare does
not have this limitation.

~~~
mkesper
Wasn't 64 in 64 a config issue? Enable VT-X?

~~~
garaetjjte
No.
[https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/4032](https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/4032)

~~~
nickjj
This 7 year old comment disturbs me: "A lot of work for questionable
usefulness. Definitely very low on our priority list.".

This looks like a clear case where the people developing the product don't
actually use it in real life. As a developer and ops person I would say this
is very likely the highest priority thing right now because it makes their
product unusable for anyone who needs to spin up a VM within their Linux based
dev VM.

------
blub
I don't see any security-related fixes. Is VBox that solid or am I missing
something? I remember also looking at previous versions and not finding
much...

~~~
viraptor
"VMM: many more fixes", "GUI: various bugfixes and internal cleanup", "Audio:
various bugfixes and infrastructure improvements" \- who know what that means.
If nobody disclosed it externally as a vulnerability, they could just call
things "bugfixes".

But it's not like they don't get any security issues at all:
[https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-
bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=virtualbox](https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-
bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=virtualbox)

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mkesper
[https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog](https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog)

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Jare
My understanding is that on Windows, VirtualBox still can't run along Docker
For Windows, because DFW needs Hyper-V and VBox is incompatible. Is this still
the case? I don't ask much of my VMs, but desktop Ubuntu guests under Hyper-V
are very clunky.

~~~
Ianvdl
IIRC that is not something that VirtualBox can fix; I read somewhere that
Hyper-V requires exclusive use of the virtualisation features of the hardware.

Note that this only applies to 64-bit virtualisation, you can still run
Hyper-V and 32-bit VirtualBox virtual machines simultaneously.

------
Can_Not
Are any modern alternatives to VMWare player and Oracle VirtualBox for running
a Linux guest OS (with GUI) on a Windows desktop host?

~~~
ilaksh
Maybe qemu?

