
VirtualBox 5.1.8 - based2
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog#v8
======
njharman
I really like vbox. When work forced me to have MS windows box I did 90℅ of my
time in Fullscreen vb running Ubuntu. I also ran widows vbs.

Now on osx I run dev db and other server as needed. Nice to roll back to
snapshot

Fits in tool box for non automated, as hoc servers. Dont have to configure
anything, or write script. Just acts like buying new hardware and slipping in
CD.

~~~
sootzoo
I really had problems going this route (Ubuntu host with Windows guest). While
the guest ran in VB reasonably well, trying to snapshot a baseline image and
generally use VBox differencing disks quickly ran me out of space on the host
SSD.

Even with a 256GB drive and a number of tweaks like hosting the Windows
pagefile and temp from a passthrough disk, disabling Windows automatic
updates, and using an immutable disk containing the OS install/multi-attach
for copy-on-write behavior, VBox still used a ton of space to track the
differences from my baseline snapshots. Even starting the VM quickly consumed
10-20GB in the new disk image. Was hard to conclude anything other than it
wasn't a viable "dual workstation" setup and I capitulated and moved to
Windows 10.

Sucks, because it was really quite nice to have a unix under the hood, though
WSL makes this a bit more tolerable in Win 10 AU.

~~~
pizza234
It's inappropriate to target space saving when it comes virtualization, as
it's not what hypervisors are designed for - if so, a hypervisor would have to
interpret the underlying FS calls, and optimize them space-wise. Besides, I
think pretty much all the formats behave the same; qcow2 for example, does not
optimize on the fly the writing of zeros.

All in all though, if you ultimately moved to a native Windows 10, therefore
allocated X space of native disk, the space requirement is not different from
having only a virtualized one with X space of virtualized disk (heck, you
could even pass a partition).

Having said that, if 10-20 GB of space are taken so quickly on boot, it may be
worth investigating (you could even vim the diff disk), but I find your claim
somewhat misleading, as you're likely experiencing this on the first absolute
boot after taking then snapshot, but not on the subsequent ones; therefore, if
your system steadily takes 20+20 GB of space, that's a perfectly reasonable
requirement.

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tcrews
VirtualBox is in maintenance mode. Nothing cool has happened in the past few
years. This release is not noteworthy.

~~~
kyriakos
what new features should it get? its a serious question, i cant think of
anything

~~~
tcrews
Better shared folders and 3D acceleration would be a good start. They are
completely broken and/or missing important features.

The community has no interest in maintaining VirtualBox, mostly because of
Oracle. It's a dead project just like OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, etc. One day,
enough customers will stop paying Oracle for it, they will look at community
contributions (rare to nonexistent?) and will close the project down
rationalizing it as they did all the work. The reality is, they don't know how
to steer open source projects and have no desire to do that anyway (separate
private bug tracker? write access to repository only to Oracle employees?
harsh email replies and comments on bug reports?).

It's on life support and will stay like that for a little while.
Unfortunately, it's the only hypervisor that vagrant supports decently and it
works on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux (as opposed to using KVM on Linux, xhyve
on OSX and Hyper-V on Windows... for someone considering building vagrant
boxes).

It's sad but completely expected.

~~~
kyriakos
can it be forked or the license is too restrictive?

~~~
pmontra
GPL2
[https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ](https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ)

------
breerly
I said goodbye to VirtualBox the day Docker's Mac/xhyve story rolled out.

It was a beautiful day.

~~~
juandazapata
How can one run Microsoft IE VMs in Docker? Genuine question, since I have to
do Internet Explorer debugging.

~~~
wfleming
To add some technical explanation to what larrybud said: Docker containers
aren't full VMs. They don't virtualize the computer hardware or the OS kernel.
So when you run a bunch of Docker containers on a computer, all of those
containers are still using the same underlying OS kernel. Docker really only
_natively_ runs on Linux (and BSD), and all Docker containers are running in
Linux, so running a Windows VM inside a Docker container would really only be
possible if you also ran something like VirtualBox _inside_ the Docker
container (and I can't really imagine that working or being a good idea).

In short: VirtualBox is still probably the best option for running those IE
VMs, and for cases like this Docker is not really a replacement for or
competitor with solutions like VirtualBox.

~~~
gaius
Yes and no: that isn't how SQL Server on Docker works... Try it for yourself:

    
    
        $ docker run -d -p 1433:1433 --env sa_password=abc123 microsoft/mssql-server-2016-express-windows

~~~
mook
That requires you to be running Windows Server 2016:
[https://github.com/Microsoft/sql-server-
samples/tree/master/...](https://github.com/Microsoft/sql-server-
samples/tree/master/samples/manage/windows-containers/mssql-
server-2016-express-windows#before-you-begin)

Essentially, they have a docker-API-compatible HTTP server that runs a
different set of container images. Similar to how SmartOS has a docker-API-
compatible HTTP server (running on top of, essentially, a Linux emulation
layer).

~~~
gaius
Well yes, that was my point. No sign of VirtualBox running Windows inside
Docker there...

------
muricula
It's a shame virtual box still doesn't support nested virtualization. As far
as I can tell on OS X only VMware can. At least on Linux you have KVM.

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herge
Anyone have as many problems as I have with virtualbox, vagrant and Ubuntu
16.04 as a guest OS? I would expect it to be one of the most common Linux
versions running in vbox now a days as it's the latest LTS.

Nonetheless, I have had all sorts of issues with trying to tie my 16.04 box to
a specific private network IPs.

~~~
geerlingguy
I've been maintaining a popular 16.04 box for VMware and VirtualBox, and it
hasn't been easy: [https://github.com/geerlingguy/packer-
ubuntu-1604](https://github.com/geerlingguy/packer-ubuntu-1604)

I finally have it stable on VirtualBox (5.0 or 5.1.x), but now am having
issues with VMware 8.5, go figure. The boxes published on Atlas are all stable
and working with any recent version of VirtualBox or VMware Fusion, though:
[https://vagrantcloud.com/geerlingguy/boxes/ubuntu1604](https://vagrantcloud.com/geerlingguy/boxes/ubuntu1604)

~~~
herge
I was about to say, the geerlingguy boxes are the only ones that work for me.
Thanks for all the work!

~~~
geerlingguy
Sure thing! I'm actually uploading a new box based on 5.1.8 today. Should be
available in Atlas soon!

------
btown
> Audio: now using Audio Queues on Mac OS X hosts

Will this improve or worsen audio latency, or is it just using a more modern
API with the same performance characteristics?

~~~
spydum
no idea, but do people actually use audio in virtualized machines? I've always
found the experience (vmware or virtualbox) to be hideous.

~~~
AnthonBerg
I do :) I run Jeskola Buzz in a Windows VM. At least in a macOS host, audio
latency is BETTER than I remember it being on native Windows (back when I ran
that).

~~~
btown
Virtualbox? Or something else?

~~~
AnthonBerg
As I recall I've tried all the VM things and found them all surprisingly good
for audio.

------
webaholic
How I wish qemu had an interface as easy to use as Virtualbox!

~~~
godmodus
using libvirt is a dream, you just have to install the vagrant-libvirt plugin
and you're ready to go. (assuming libvirtd is already up and running)

~~~
scrollaway
No two way shared folders though. This is really a problem when using vagrant
to develop off a git tree outside vagrant

~~~
godmodus
U can cron rsync inside the machine - unless I misunderstood your use case

~~~
scrollaway
If I have a local git tree, which is mirrored in the guest, and I change a
file in the host I want it to be changed immediately in the guest.

When the application, running in the guest, output files in the main directory
I want them to immediately be available in the host.

This is like vagrant's #1 use case, I don't get why it's not receiving more
attention.

------
walterbell
How is guest support for macOS Sierra?

------
cma
Have they fixed "you can't scroll while moving the mouse" yet?

------
olgeni
FreeBSD guest under OS X host: 5.1.8 broke something with NAT, and sockets get
closed randomly. 5.1.6 is ok.

------
fivesigma
Released 11 days ago.

Why is this news?

------
eternalban
Has anyone ever checked for backdoors baked into these virtualization layers?

~~~
jacquesm
Dive right in:

[https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk](https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk)

This also ties into 'reproducible builds', even if you find nothing at all
what does it mean if you compile the sources and don't end up with a binary
that is identical. Oh, and do make sure to check if your compiler isn't
inserting it's own backdoor.

~~~
eternalban
Precisely what I was wondering. We point the finger at security theatre but it
seems we're running a few theatrical productions of our own.

~~~
jacquesm
The real problem is that security tends to wreck stuff in absolute terms (as
in binary: your company lives versus your company dies) but until that happens
it is seen as a cost without any benefits.

------
user5994461
VirtualBox = a poor VmWare, full of bugs and incompatibilities.

~~~
dahdum
Vagrant works pretty poorly with VMware, even with the paid plugin. So I use
Virtualbox for Dev even though I have VMware installed too.

~~~
tcrews
I pad for the VMware plugin and the support was awful. It's supported on a
best effort basis.

The horrible VMware plugin is what's making us stick to VirtualBox, even
though everybody hates it (shared folders and 3D acceleration being the worst
areas).

3D acceleration on VMware Workstation 12.1 is awesome (60fps inside the VM in
OpenGL) and it let's me use the VM as a full desktop without even noticing I'm
on a VM. Shared folders performance is also 10x better than VirtualBox.

Unfortunately, I have to use vagrant for work and that means my VMware install
is dormant... and vagrant's VMware plugin license was wasted money.

~~~
bdcravens
> I paid for the VMware plugin and the support was awful

I paid for the plugin early on, when it was Hashicorp's first monetization
effort. Having good experiences with similar projects like Sidekiq Pro, I was
quite surprised when an issue I ran into was summarily dismissed. I can't
imagine what it's like post-funding.

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ifhs
No touchbar integration? I can think of some very useful shortcuts around full
screening

~~~
okket
11 days ago Touch Bar did not exist in public. If you want to add it, here are
the sources:

[https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk#src/VBox](https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk#src/VBox)

But it looks like it is not an easy task thanks to Qt.

~~~
ifhs
I assumed this was made available as closed beta to popular software

~~~
okket
No. Touch Bar was kept private until release day, only an oversight made it
public ~ a day before the release.

------
SFJulie
So far oracle has successfully turned into crap every single community of free
software they put their hands on: \- java, \- mysql, \- openoffice.

Just because I believe in the power of communities over the power of license
and I see a pattern in Oracle corporate culture inability to plays nicely with
open source communities I know give up on using any free software that is
related to Oracle.

R.I.P. virtualbox.

~~~
Gracana
Oracle is pretty terrible, but... What's wrong with virtual box?

