
VirtualBox is garbage - hbrouwer
https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317
======
tzury
The content of the article which does not work for most of HN.

    
    
        Enter your search termsSubmit search formWeblkml.org
        Date	Thu, 6 Oct 2011 15:05:27 -0400
        From	Dave Jones <>
        Subject	RFC: virtualbox tainting.
        The number of bug reports we get from people with virtualbox loaded are
        truly astonishing.  It's GPL, but sadly that doesn't mean it's good.
        Nearly all of these bugs look like random corruption. (corrupt linked lists,
        corrupt page tables, and just plain 'weird' crashes).
    
        This diff adds tainting to the module loader to treat it as we do with stuff
        from staging/ (crap). With this tainting in place, automatic bug filing tools
        can opt out of automatically filing kernel bugs, and inform the user to file
        bugs somewhere more appropriate.
    
        Signed-off-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
    
        diff --git a/kernel/module.c b/kernel/module.c
        index 04379f92..d26c9a3 100644
        --- a/kernel/module.c
        +++ b/kernel/module.c
        @@ -2653,6 +2653,10 @@ static int check_module_license_and_versions(struct module *mod)
            if (strcmp(mod->name, "ndiswrapper") == 0)
                add_taint(TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE);
         
        +	/* vbox is garbage. */
        +	if (strcmp(mod->name, "vboxdrv") == 0)
        +		add_taint(TAINT_CRAP);
        +
            /* driverloader was caught wrongly pretending to be under GPL */
            if (strcmp(mod->name, "driverloader") == 0)
                add_taint_module(mod, TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE);

~~~
copper
Honest question: is a strcmp really the best way there is to test for specific
kernel modules?

~~~
joelthelion
What's wrong with it?

~~~
xentronium
strcmp (and many other string routines like strlen, strcpy) relies on strings
being null terminated. Safe versions (strncmp, strnlen, strncpy) have a
parameter for maximum string length.

I am pretty sure that in this particular case it is not passed any user input,
so it's kinda safe.

~~~
antihero
Would be a pretty neat exploit to buffer overflow someone's actual kernel via
a carefully constructed module name, though.

~~~
1amzave
A neat hack, yes...but probably not worthwhile from the perspective of an
actual attacker (if you've got permissions to load a kernel module, you could
just load one of your own crafting to do whatever nefarious things you wanted
directly).

------
wladimir
Virtualbox works fine for me. Though I only use it to run Windows XP so I'm
probably not a demanding customer, but calling it garbage is kind of over-the
top. It's very useful for me for running some windows-only software that
refuses to work in Wine, and to test my sw on windows without having to
reboot...

~~~
wh-uws
I run windows 7 _with Aero effects enabled_

Virtualbox is wonderful. Does it have bugs and need work? Of course.

What software doesn't?

~~~
ajross
kvm, for one. Not quite as featureful, and the UI is a command line (though
there's the virt manager stuff that I haven't tried). But it's rock solid
virtualization that never gives me problems.

I think people are misunderstanding this thread. This is a kernel developers
thread, where Dave Jones is complaining that virtualbox is the source of too
much random corruption and arbitrary crashes in the kernel, and he's
submitting a patch that "taints" the module such the presence of virtualbox
gets flagged in kernel panics (and thus automated bug reports, etc..).

It's unstable software, and that taint is important information that prevents
people from wasting effort chasing non-bugs in other components. No one is
flaming about it vs. vmware or whatever, or telling you what to use.

~~~
sherr
"kvm, for one."

Surely you're not saying KVM is bug free? Looks like it. That's almost
certainly wrong.

~~~
ajross
I am surely not saying kvm is bug free. I am, however, saying it's much better
than virtualbox.

~~~
aquayellow
No it's not. It has its own set of problems. And bugs too! KVM has its pluses
too, I agree, it's a VMM in kernel mode which apparently makes it faster, it
is very non-intrusive to the rest of the kernel and hence got readily accepted
upstream and so some might argue in that sense that it's better. But even
though I have been hacking into KVM recently, for running a VM at home on my
laptop/PC, I will always opt for VirtualBox for its simple ease of usage.

------
buster
I recently switched from VMWare to Virtualbox because i was sick of finding
patches for VMWare kernel modules everytime there is a new kernel version out.
I had some major bugs on VMWare too, usually. Either some keys stopped working
(in the host system!) or the VM crashed completely.. I used Virtualbox only
for a few hours but it didn't have any hickups so far.

Unfortunately i can't read the article either..

~~~
buster
That's the mailinglist entry:

<http://pastebin.com/WiVPiMgp>

------
pwaring
Potentially easier link to read, in terms of the threading:

<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1200194>

------
munchhausen
There are many voices in defense of VirtualBox in this thread already, but I
will still add mine, because VirtualBox has been a great tool for me and I
feel it deserves to be defended. For the last three years I use Virtualbox to
run Windows and Linux VMs on a Linux host. Other than a handful of weird
hickups of Windows XP guests, which can probably be attributed to the guest
OS, I did not run into any major problems in what must be thousands of hours
of guest and hypervisor uptime.

VMware Workstation, OTOH, crashed my host(!) system hard several times, which
actually drove me to Virtualbox in the first place. Granted, that was three
years ago, but I did not have any reason to give VMware Workstation another
try, as Virtualbox works very well for me.

------
Spyro7
The link in the parent is https, try this regular http link if you can't read
the article:

<http://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317>

~~~
ch0wn
Or this if it still does not load:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lkml.or...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317&hl=en&strip=1)

~~~
mhitza
Or this <http://lkml.org.nyud.net/lkml/2011/10/6/317>

------
wccrawford
A slightly less caustic way of saying it would be to say that bug reports from
things running on virtual box are garbage.

~~~
larrik
I read it as being that the hosts themselves are the ones generating garbage
bug reports, rather than the virtualized OS's?

Otherwise, yours would be a much better title for this.

------
Argorak
Although I am a heavy VirtualBox-user (vagrant is just too good), I can relate
to this.

The only reason why my machine ever panicks is exactly the one cited in this
mail: vboxdrv.

------
hippich
Google Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WThcCZI...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WThcCZIZus0J:lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317+site:lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317&hl=en&strip=1)

------
ronnier
It's an extremely complex piece of software that's free. I'm thankful to have
it available and find it to work well.

------
gregfjohnson
I have used VirtualBox on a linux host with WinXP as the client operating
system for about three years, every day. I depend on it for work and have
found it to be rock-solid and completely dependable. I really appreciate the
contributors to the project. They deserve some love!

~~~
robocat
Same anecdote: fulltime dev for 3 years using multiple windows guests on Linux
host running Vbox (only switching to host occasionally). Linux box never
crashes. I and a coworker (using windows on windows 95% of time in guest) love
VirtualBox.

But no arguments if those with real data flag driver as SHIT - a crash rate of
o. I am just thankful that I have never had any crashes.

------
bajsejohannes
VirtualBox is a fantastic piece of software. Just because it's not perfect,
doesn't mean it's garbage. Far from it.

~~~
uxp
The VirtualBox software (as in the UI, etc) is great, however this
article/mail listing is discussing the 'vboxdrv' Linux kernel module, which is
a source of a large number of bug reports to the Linux kernel project.

~~~
suivix
Maybe there are so many bug reports because so many people use it?

~~~
lurker19
Maybe you should read the article to learn what he specific issue being
discussed is.

------
singular
I've had quite a few issues with it.

1\. Copy + paste randomly breaks between host win32, client ubuntu32.

2\. Random freezes every so often.

3\. Seamless mode extremely unreliable, does not draw correctly.

4\. Horrible issues with shared folders breaking io operations. I actually got
a (trivial) patch into golang to work around this issue (!). This also
completely breaks ido mode completions in emacs.

5\. Occasionally shared folders get into an odd state and no files can be read
from/written to them.

4 + 5 might be specific to the way I use shared folders though, as I access
them via a dropbox folder sat in a truecrypt volume.

~~~
kijin
I use VirtualBox to run Ubuntu 32-bit and various other Linux distros on Win7
64-bit. No Truecrypt or Dropbox is involved. I have similar occasional issues
with shared folders.

Access denied randomly when trying to overwrite files. Files renamed in the
host becoming inaccessible from the guest. NTFS symlinks in the host appearing
as normal folders in the guest one day and as broken links the next day.
Terribly slow I/O overall. I used to bookmark and keep track of several bug
reports on the official bugtracker, but I gave up because nobody seemed to
care.

The only reason I still use shared folders is because it's still slightly less
painful than CIFS/Samba.

~~~
copper
Hm, I've seen some really weird unicode-related corruption hitting files
shared between guest and host due to (I assume) different line ending
convention. Figuring out what was going on was _not_ fun at all.

------
marcf
Yeah, VirtualBox crashes for me all the time. Does it have automatic error
reporting to Oracle on why it is unstable? I would hope that these crashes are
fixable.

------
vogonj
one particular aspect of VirtualBox has pissed me off in recent days. the
system-level debugger is complete trash; it totally fails to do even simple
things like inserting working breakpoints. at one point I had to resort to
dropping int 3s into my code wherever I thought I might eventually want a
breakpoint, and even that doesn't work most of the time.

so I gave up on VirtualBox and switched to QEMU, which works significantly
better.

------
sp332
I can't remember the last time I saw a stock Ubuntu guest crash a VM process,
but VirtualBox crashed 4 times in the last 2 days.

~~~
hbrouwer
I think I managed to crash it about ten times last sunday, doing nothing but
browsing the web on a VM.

~~~
Freaky
I can't remember the last time I crashed VirtualBox, browsing or not. Even
with older 64-bit Flash. Only issue I recall is some snapshot breakage a while
back.

Yay anecdotes.

~~~
StavrosK
Seconded. It's never crashed for me, I love it.

------
tm65atcolumbia
I run my startup on a MBP with multiple VMs. It's been a love/hate affair with
VirtualBox, but so far I manage to live with the shortcomings. Can't argue
with free. Tried Parallel early on when truly frustrated, but found it doesn't
add much over VBox to justify the price. Here are a few tips that I live by:

1\. Obviously, never put critical data on a VM not matter how stable it seems.
Definitely have Dropbox installed.

2\. Make it a good habit to pause the VM before you pack up and go or switch
to a different network. When turning it back on, disconnect the network
interface then reconnect.

3\. When the UI freezes, you can rescue on a Mac with AppleKey+F6 (or a few
other Func keys) to another tty console. Login there and reboot. After you get
the VM back, VBox likes it when you do a proper reboot before you resume
working.

4\. Take snapshot regularly, definitely right after you just checkin a major
chunk of code!

------
ohyes
Not Garbage. Default configuration is not optimal, however.

I use it all the time on Windows XP to run Ubuntu.

Initially, I did have a few problems because I didn't have Ubuntu or
Virtualbox configured correctly. Also, I wasn't using 'VBOXADDITIONS,' which
actually are extremely useful and important.

Some quick googling fixed my problems, in any case and I don't have any
problems with it anymore.

~~~
eropple
Except that this is a common kernel panic cause _using Linux as a host
machine_.

------
garethsprice
Wonder if there's a selection bias here; VirtualBox may be less stable than
native hardware or commercial VMs, but it's user base is also using VirtualBox
for different scenarios than native users.

I know I use VirtualBox all the time to try out "risky" behaviors that often
end in a crash, because I know I can just roll back if it doesn't work out.

~~~
ajross
The issue is that virtualbox is crashing the _host_ kernel, not the guest
machines. And specifically that it's polluting Red Hat's automated bug reports
from those crashes, and thus wasting QA effort. Being able to filter those out
by the taint mechanism in the patch is important and useful information. Read
the thread, it's a technical and process discussion, not a flame.

~~~
garethsprice
Ah, missed that, thanks for noting. Yep, that's messed up :)

------
yesimahuman
VirtualBox running on a Windows 7 host with a Linux guest works great and
improves each major release.

That being said, I've had severe issues with networking on older releases.
Often the interface would work on the guest right after install, but would
then completely fail the next time the VM was powered on.

It seems that has largely been fixed though.

~~~
shoota
I'm running into an issue where I get intermittent internet disconnection on
the guest. I can't pinpoint what's causing but gmail will just start to time
out. Wasn't there in Vbox 3.x though.

------
mark_l_watson
VirtualBox has always worked very well for me. Perhaps the poster did not
install it correctly or just doesn't know what they are doing?

Just not me: I know about a half dozen people who also use VirtualBox, and I
haven'heard complaints. Perhaps the poster works for one of the commercial
competitors.

Strange rant against a good, and free tool.

------
patrickod
I can't read the article at the moment as it seems the server has died but I
can say that in my use of VirtualBox on OS X in the last 2 years I have yet to
have a major crash. The majority of the time it has been used for very
temporary staging environments in Debian and it's been perfect for this.

------
incub8or
VirtualBox runs XP and Win7 perfectly on my MBP2011; it has saved my skin a
number of times and am not sure why it does not work for some people. I was
considering getting Parallels but this seems to do the trick and works for 2
other people I know as well. Plus it's free....

------
sarp
I agree that VirtualBox has problems.I was running Ubuntu on Mac OS X using
VirtualBox because it was free, however it kept crashing constantly and didn't
shut down properly.

I bought Parallels instead, and I am happy so far

------
johnbender
The project has some other notable issues that can be quite frustrating.
Primary among them the performance of the shared folder file system with
complex file structures (the reason why Vagrant uses NFS).

------
hamidnazari
I've been using VirtualBox for the last 15 months on a daily basis. I've used
it on Windows XP, Windows 7, Ubuntu and recently on Mac hosts with Windows XP,
Windows 7, and Ubuntu guests. I've never ran into any problems with it. The
only thing that doesn't work properly is 3D Acceleration which I think has
something to do with my system's graphics card probably.

Two of my friends however lost their guest machines (Windows and Ubuntu) on
the Mac version. Hope it doesn't happen on my Mac.

In my opinion, VirtualBox is an amazing piece of software, and calling it
"garbage" is harsh and unprofessional.

------
sunsu
I only use it as a local development server running Ubuntu, but I've never had
any problems with Virtualbox running on OSX or Win7.

------
drivingmenuts
Works fine for me - there's aren't any other free options that I'm aware of,
so I guess I'm kind of stuck with it.

------
dendory
I wouldn't know about kernel bugs, but from having tried many VMs I prefer
VirtualBox by a long shot.

------
jfruh
Has anyone managed to get Windows 8 running in VirtualBox on OS X? I've tried,
keep getting errors.

~~~
robgough
Yup, worked for me. Have you ticked all the relevant options in the VM
Settings?

    
    
      First stop in the System menu. Start with the Motherboard
      sub-menu and check Enable IO APIC to improve performance 
      for your virtual machine. In the Processor sub-menu check
      Enable PAE/NX (again, to boost performance). Finally under 
      the Acceleration sub-menu make sure both of the hardware 
      virtualization boxes are checked—VT-x/AMD-V and Nested 
      Paging, respectively.

\- Taken from [http://www.howtogeek.com/74515/how-to-test-drive-
windows-8-i...](http://www.howtogeek.com/74515/how-to-test-drive-windows-8-in-
virtualbox/) (which I know is a Windows guide, but check the same settings in
OS X)

~~~
jfruh
Hadn't seen those, will give it a shot!

------
there
i guess not much has changed in their code in 3 years:

[http://old.nabble.com/Bug-reports-regarding-Innotek-
VirtualB...](http://old.nabble.com/Bug-reports-regarding-Innotek-VirtualBox-
td15907184.html)

------
saljam
I've tried vbox when I used a mac and couldn't get past the user interface.
The gui severely limits what I can easily do with it, and it's just plain
irritating sometimes.

Now I'm back on linux and kvm/qemu, and I'm much happier. Why are people using
vbox over kvm?

~~~
lurker19
VBox has an extensive commandine tool suite and configuration language at
least on Windows.

------
justinj
although i love VBox, i confess i've had serious issues with it on OSX running
the Win8 Dev Preview.

(the amount of times i've now seen the apple lightbox of death is pretty
ridic)

------
mrsebastian
Aw, I think we killed the site :(

Has someone got a copy of the text?

~~~
andyn
Here's a cached copy from Google:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317&strip=1)

------
hackermom
Apart from VirtualBox being notably slower (and less complete in working
D3D/OpenGL support) than f.e. Parallels Desktop, I can't say I've had any
gripes or stability issues with it, barring a recent, short-lived bug that
caused VBox to automatically power down an active VM as soon as it went idle.
I've been using VBox on OS X for a bit over 2 years now, for development
purposes related to Windows XP, OpenBSD, one or two Linux distributions, and
even Haiku.

------
WhatDoIKnow
I've used it for years on Ubuntu and Windows with almost no issues. This
headline is garbage.

~~~
viraptor
Not necessarily. You're presenting a data point only, while the poster of the
patch marked the module CRAP for a specific reason - that module produced too
many bug reports which are not relevant to the distributions since they
originate in vboxdrv. From that perspective vboxdrv is garbage and people who
deal with that problem agree.

Data point is as relevant as "I keep crossing on red light for years now and
nothing bad happened".

