
VirtualBox 6.1 - h0ek
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog-6.1#v0
======
resoluteteeth
It might be better to steer clear of VirtualBox and other Oracle products
because of the licensing issues:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/04/oracle_virtualbox_m...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/04/oracle_virtualbox_merula/)

If you only use the open source parts you're okay, but it's a bit scary.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
This is my policy as well.

My perception of Oracle is that they'll do very underhanded, even criminal,
acts to extract money from entities who have at one time used their software.

Happily, I have enough alternatives to VirtualBox to let me avoid that risk.

~~~
luisgbm
What alternatives do you recommend?

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Natales
Having ran my home (and work) lab environments with many different
virtualization systems, in the end, I always keep coming back to VMware. ESXi
in particular. These days, with GPU pass-through, you can make it a
workstation and a server at the same time. It's free for personal use and it's
rock solid.

~~~
gschrader
In the same vein, Proxmox is another choice, it's open source (or you can pay
for support), also allows for GPU pass-through.

~~~
gnufx
Proxmox is a management layer over LVM (and LXC), not a different
virtualization technology.

~~~
gschrader
I assume you mean KVM. Yes it's based on existing technologies, I wouldn't
necessarily call it just a management layer however.

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yabadabadoes
I used to use virtualbox but I became afraid of being trolled by Oracle using
gradually changing license terms a few years back and stopped updating.

I'm curious if anyone knows of a table summarizing these products and what
their licensing would mean for a laptop you may take to work, etc?

~~~
grenoire
A framework I wanted to trial provided VB VMs instead of containers,
definitely made me stop for a bit and think if I wanted to use VB (ended up
using it anyway).

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josteink
On Linux, I’ve entirely replaced Vbox with virt-manager and QEMU.

As a bonus, virt-manager can connect to remote libvirt/QEMU instanced over
SSH, making it easier to manage a small “farm”.

On Windows I find myself happy enough with Hyper-V too.

I really don’t miss virtualbox at all.

~~~
lasftew
Second that - Hyper-V is my preferred way to run a Linux dev machine on a
Windows machine. Killer feature: dynamic memory (a VMs memory footprint grows
and shrinks with its needs).

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rwmj
As a (part time) qemu developer, why do you think VirtualBox is preferable,
eg. what are the feature gaps that qemu doesn't provide, or what could qemu do
better? (And by "qemu" I include the broader free ecosystem like virt-install,
virt-manager, etc)

~~~
x3sphere
Shared folder support is lacking. I have to use NFS to share any folders in
VMs when using QEMU and virt-manager. Which isn’t necessarily bad but it’s an
extra config step. The built in method (which uses Plan9 I think?) is a huge
headache in terms of setting up permissions. Out of the box it never works
right and there isn’t any straightforward documentation on getting it
configured properly.

VirtualBox, VMware and Parallels all offer much better shared folder options
that are built in.

~~~
rwmj
virtio-fs should fix the problems with 9p. It offers better performance and
conformance with POSIX.

~~~
x3sphere
Awesome, that's great to hear.

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headgasket
FEAT>> Nested virtualization on intel. This is a big deal, for dev and
testing. Congrats to the devs, thank you. You can now run a hypervisor hosting
real vms at decent speeds inside VB.

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overcast
Looks like a lot of Graphics related upgrades/fixes. I desperately hope this
makes the experience better, onto downloads!

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jancsika
Is it allowed by Apple to set up a macOS version N virtualbox guest on macOS
version N host?

Because I'm trying and I can't imagine how their OS could be more hostile
toward me doing it...

~~~
plorkyeran
You're now allowed to run up to two macOS guests in VMs as long as you're
running on Apple hardware.

It's pretty painless with VMWare Fusion.

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finchisko
What are the highlights of the new versions?

Also

>Linux host: Drop PCI passthrough, the current code is too incomplete (cannot
handle PCIe devices at all), i.e. not useful enough

does this affect usb drives and devices?

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MaupitiBlue
If only they could come up with a WSL2 Hyper-V workaround.

~~~
pdfbadforunicod
Can you clarify what you mean?

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Karunamon
I believe the problem is that if you're running WSL2, you're automatically
running Hyper-V, which monopolizes hardware virtualization on the machine, so
you can't run VirtualBox, VMware, etc.

~~~
wbl
Wait, it's not a kernel personality anymore?

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tw04
They've moved away from that due to complaints about I/O performance. There
was no way to "fix" it without the hyper-V shim.

[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-
wsl-2/](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/)

~~~
techntoke
WSL was a failed attempt by Microsoft, WSL2 will not be any better. Look at
the problems it is causing for people already, and it isn't even GA yet.

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phonon
Interesting how the Windows download went from (VirtualBox 6.0.14) 163 MB to
(6.1.0) 107 MB. Wonder why...

~~~
comfydragon
It could have something to do with this:

 _Virtualization core: Drop recompiler, i.e. running VMs now needs a CPU
supporting hardware virtualization_

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pdfbadforunicod
It seems to me that Oracle is doing well in cloud, may not be too long before
they beat the number 4 Google.

~~~
eropple
I mean, this has little to do with the article, but it's also a bonkers claim.
Doing well? Oracle Cloud is a literal punchline and has no argument for its
existence, let alone its use, beyond "we're Oracle, now be a dear and lean
back so we can get at your delicious throat bits".

What would a bunch of extremely legacy technology--and this is a great
example, between OS-supported virtualization in Windows and OS X getting good
and virtualization solutions having already been just fine on Linux for a long
time, VirtualBox hasn't had a meaningful reason to exist for going on five
years now--and the worst reputation in the industry do to leapfrog Google
Cloud? (If they're even actually "number 4" in the first place.)

~~~
singlow
Not trying to defend the claim itself but it is related:

From article:

\- Implemented support for importing a virtual machine from Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure \- Extended support for exporting a virtual machine to Oracle
Cloud Infrastructure, allowing the creation of multiple virtual machines
without re-uploading. Also added option to export a VM to the cloud using the
more efficient variant "paravirtialized", and to specify free-form tags for
cloud images

~~~
ti_ranger
> Also added option to export a VM to the cloud using the more efficient
> variant "paravirtialized"

So they don't seem to be very serious about multi-tenancy?

(Spectre and Meltdown are more or less considered the nails in the coffin of
Xen para-virtualisation for multi-tenant environments).

