
VirtualBox 6.0 released - johanhammar
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog-6.0#v0
======
robert_foss
Avoid VirtualBox and becoming trapped in the non-free & personal use only
extension by using one of the very decent open source alternatives Boxes[1] or
virt-manager[2]

[1]
[https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/Boxes](https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/Boxes)

[2] [https://virt-manager.org/](https://virt-manager.org/)

~~~
organsnyder
Even worse: Oracle is going around and threatening to sue enterprises that
show traffic to the extensions download site from their IP blocks. Happened
recently at a previous employer of mine.

~~~
setquk
Any public references for this anywhere?

~~~
chomp
Personal anecdote: They came after us, since the extension phones home and
they could track it to our ASN. Asked us for an audit of all installs of VB.
The idea was that they wanted to then charge us big money for a corporate
license.

Instead, IT banned it enterprise-wide. Which is sad, because we like it for
Vagrant. We've since started moving all of our developer stuff to OpenShift,
so we're not totally up a creek.

~~~
arminiusreturns
I have a devops guy trying to push me to use Vagrant at the moment, but I am
aware of these issues with virtualbox. I was thinking about using one of the
lxc shims, but now you have me curious, how useful is openshift in that "I
want to spin local vms up for testing" approach? I thought it was much more
geared to server and not workstation, as opposed to vagrant.

Of course others are right, virt-manager is probably a better replacement I
think.

~~~
nullify88
Out of curiosity, what feature in the extension pack are you using with
Vagrant?

~~~
setquk
USB pass through support to drive hardware debuggers here.

------
tmn007
Be careful about VirtualBox Extensions which is non free on commercial
environments. Oracle is hunting non compliance and VB provides them with lots
of telemetry.

~~~
porker
How do you license them? I've never seen a "Buy now" link, only the text about
"Free for personal use" every time.

~~~
krylon
I vaguely recall that this was discussed here on HN a while ago and somebody
who had actually tried to buy the necessary license reported that Oracle would
not sell them the license; IIRC, the sales person told them to "just use it,
we don't care", or something along those lines.

Which is very problematic, of course, without something in writing, and given
Oracle's reputation.

~~~
amyjess
If you live in a one-party state, secretly record them and then if Oracle
threatens to sue, show them the recording and remind them of promissory
estoppel.

(IANAL!)

~~~
torstenvl
Not really promissory estoppel, which can enforce a promise if you
detrimentally relied on it. It's not really to your detriment to use the
product for free, so it's not a perfect fit (unless maybe your company hired
someone to administer the VMs, specifically based on his VirtualBox
experience?).

Some other possibilities would be the _parol evidence rule_ (verbal exchanges
between the contracting parties and their effect on contract interpretation)
and possibly _laches_ (no equitable remedy for folks who know about an
infringement on their rights and do nothing about it... but money damages
isn't an equity claim).

(IAAL but I don't practice in this area, so same grain of salt applies)

~~~
MaupitiBlue
I think amyjess is right.

From the Restatement Second:

§ 90. Promise Reasonably Inducing Action or Forbearance

(1) A promise which the promisor should reasonably expect to induce action or
forbearance on the part of the promisee or a third person and which does
induce such action or forbearance is binding if injustice can be avoided only
by enforcement of the promise. The remedy granted for breach may be limited as
justice requires.

If Oracle says "go ahead and use it" and then sues you for having used it,
they lose. If they sue you to stop using it going forward, they win.

~~~
torstenvl
I can understand how you'd think that, reading the text of the rule in the
Restatement. However, at common law - and as shown in the examples if you'd
keep reading - there has to be some _detrimental_ reliance. Being able to use
a product isn't in an of itself to your detriment. However, hiring someone
based on that understanding might be.

 _A, knowing that B is going to college, promises B that A will give him $
5,000 on completion of his course. B goes to college, and borrows and
[[[spends more than $ 5,000 for college expenses.]]] When he has nearly
completed his course, A notifies him of an intention to revoke the promise. A
's promise is binding and B is entitled to payment on completion of the course
without regard to whether his performance was “bargained for” under § 71._

(detrimental reliance in triple square brackets)

I have a hard time imagining a case being granted summary judgment for the
defendant just because Oracle's customer sales rep told him "we don't really
care."

In all honesty, the legal issue is more likely to be whether the person on the
phone had apparent authority to grant a license. Even if a promissory estoppel
theory would work, the person speaking to you would still have to be in some
position (or appear to be in some position) to bind Oracle to a promise he/she
made.

------
sandstrom
Too bad none of these two bugs has been fixed:

[https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9069](https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9069)

[https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12597](https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12597)

(cannot use `sendfile` in nginx inside a virtualbox, due to an eight year old
bug)

~~~
nickjj
Yeah it's crazy that it's not fixed yet. About 5 years when I was using VMs
for my development environment I remember that bug causing all sorts of issues
with assets not loading correctly.

It's also why I recommend people avoid Docker Toolbox like the plague since it
uses VirtualBox under the hood. Either use Docker for Windows (if you have
Windows 10 Pro), or roll your own VMWare Player (free) VM which doesn't have
that bug, has way better I/O performance in the end and isn't much harder to
set up.

~~~
user5994461
This might surprise you but neither of these 2 are bugs.

VirtualBox shared folders simply don't offer the guarantees of a local
filesystem. They are not a local filesystem, they are network drives mounted
as NFS, with the abysmal support and quirk that comes with that.

sendfile() doesn't work on network drives. it never did. the host is not aware
of changes made to the remote filesystem from another host. it cannot see
updated files unless it checks for remote changes.

~~~
nickjj
But from our point of view (the end user), it feels like a bug with VirtualBox
because this problem doesn't exist when using VMWare or Hyper-V.

I used a VMWare Player driven VM as a primary Linux development environment
for full time web development for literally 4 years straight and I encountered
the issue 0 times, but with VirtualBox I encountered the issue in 1 day.

Maybe it's not technically a bug with VirtualBox, but it is something that
makes VirtualBox unsuitable as a dev environment for web development.

~~~
pas
You're right that it's a major UX hurdle. But it's not a bug in an advertised
feature. Not a technical oversight, not a glitch.

Yes, vboxfs is very restrictive, but then again, the whole cross platform
virtualization is a very thin curtain of magic over the nasty differences
behind.

------
benkillin
According to the change log, the guest to host escape vulnerability with the
e1000 networking driver was not fixed, or at least it is not listed as being
fixed. Is this correct that it is not fixed?

[https://github.com/MorteNoir1/virtualbox_e1000_0day](https://github.com/MorteNoir1/virtualbox_e1000_0day)

~~~
geerlingguy
Oracle has an arcane policy of not mentioning any security fixes for any of
their managed products, except for once a quarter. The flaw has been fixed as
of 5.2.22, but the VirtualBox devs are not allowed to mention it until
sometime in January I think.

------
plq
Virtualbox is not your only option if you want to use Vagrant. Vagrant has
decent plugins for qemu (vagrant-libvirt) and lxd (vagrant-lxd)

Make sure you get your KVM, Qemu and libvirt setup right and run:

    
    
        vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt
        vagrant init generic/ubuntu1804
        vagrant up --provider=libvirt
    

You can export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=libvirt to avoid passing
--provider=libvirt to vagrant all the time.

vagrant-lxd is less mature but just as useful, especially when you need to run
stuff with erratic RSS graphs.

~~~
genocidicbunny
You can also put

    
    
      ENV['VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER'] = <provider>
    

In your Vagrantfile to force a specific provider to always be used for that
Vagrantfile.

------
orf
> Added support for using Hyper-V as the fallback execution core on Windows
> host, to avoid inability to run VMs at the price of reduced performance

Any comparisons between hyper-v and virtual box performance? I would have
assumed hyper-v would be more performant.

~~~
Daviey
Out of curiosity, why do you have a presumption that hyper-v would have better
performance?

~~~
orf
This may be completely wrong, but as I understand it when you enable hyper-v
it sits above your Windows install, and runs your windows as a hyper-v VM. So,
rather than running a userland vbox process that has OS overhead (especially
around disk IO) it can run much closer to the metal.

~~~
zamalek
If I remember correctly, Hyper-V is not strictly a type 1 hypervisor ("runs
your windows as a hyper-v VM") but comes close. The VMs still run pretty close
to the metal, but your host OS is mostly free from hypervisor interference.

------
DNT_
Is there anyone who could explain to me why virtualbox is still being
developed? I don't mean that as an attack on the developers or the software
but Oracle ruined pretty much all of Sun's software with VBox being one of the
only two exception along with Java.

~~~
jsjohnst
Define “ruined” to you. By my definition, oracle took something that was
“ok’ish, especially when you didn’t want to pay and just had basic needs”
product and have slowly chipped away anything that could be considered good
for most.

~~~
apsdsm
↑ this sounds like a pretty good definition of ruined.

~~~
jsjohnst
Exactly my thoughts, but GP claimed that Vbox wasn’t ruined.

------
bakery2k
Is anyone using VirtualBox on the desktop? Specifically, to run
Linux/macOS/Windows guests on a macOS host?

Would you recommend it? Or is the best option VMware Fusion, Parallels, or
something else?

~~~
octopoc
I recently got a Mac and wanted to avoid the cost of Parallels, so I tried
VirtualBox first. It was insanely slow. Like, I would be typing text into a VM
and I would type a line, then wait and watch the characters appear. This
happened on a 2018 Macbook Pro host with 32GB RAM. This happened on both
Windows and Ubuntu guests.

So, I tried Parallels and it was so fast I can't really tell the difference
between the host and guest in terms of speed. I highly recommend Parallels.

~~~
stinos
_I tried VirtualBox first. It was insanely slow_

Colleague of mine has Windows running on VMWare on OSX and it's not much
better. Also, but this might be because of the keyboard/OS/VMWare settings he
uses, but when my muscle memory gets to work and starts using basic key
combinations it feels like half of the time they are intercepted by OSX and do
funny things, opening apps I don't want or switching desktops or whatever etc.
No joy. All in all, of all non-commandline development experiences I ever
encountered it's probably the worst. Parallels on the other hand was indeed
more 'just works, get shit done'.

------
jbverschoor
No usage of hypervisor.framework... so never mind.

~~~
sys_64738
I've been using Parallels Desktop Lite which is free for Linux and MacOS X
guests.

------
_Codemonkeyism
I've switched our development environment years ago to VMWare (OSX) from
VirtualBox because it didn't work well with fixed IPs, would change the IPs
and I couldn't pin them - worked for some time then changed the IP. Has this
changed?

------
Koshkin
But _the true hacker_ uses QEMU.

------
PolCPP
'MacOS Guest Additions: initial support'

I thought that with a dozen hacks it already worked? What did they add?
Official support?

------
fuzzy2
> Major rework of user interface with simpler and more powerful application
> and virtual machine set-up

Anyone found out yet what that’s supposed to mean? Looks all the same to me
except colors and icons and animations nobody needs.

------
rvanmil
Using this release with Vagrant and the ubuntu/bionic64 (20181214.0.0) box
resulted in a very slow boot process which caused Vagrant to abort due to the
boot timeout.

It looks like this was caused by a workaround I had implemented for the exact
same issue on previous releases:

    
    
      vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--uartmode1", "disconnected"]
    

After removing this line the box boots up normally again.

------
AltruisticGap
The VMSVGA for linux guests sounds awesome, since they previously removed 3D
support for "linux guests using Wayland".. ie. Ubuntu 18.10.

Can any linux experts here explain briefly what is required to get this VMSVGA
support? (win 10 host, Ubuntu guest)

Do I have to grab additional drivers or "guest additions" from VMware? Or will
Ubuntu 18.10 have 3D support out of the box if I run in with VB6 ?

------
znpy
I _love_ how the website has been keep basically unchanged through the years.
Its design is clear and easily navigable.

I hope it doesn't change.

~~~
xbryanx
I think (guessing) that's because this site is 90% just-a-slightly-themed Trac
install. It's admirable that the design for that tool has stayed so
consistent.

[https://trac.edgewall.org/](https://trac.edgewall.org/)

~~~
znpy
It's nice when things that work don't get change for changing's sake.

------
roywiggins
I'm sure there are more useful changes but honestly I'm just happy that it
finally supports my HiDPI screen.

------
ngrilly
I'm unable to find anything about the vboximg-mount utility in the
documentation, except in the release notes.

~~~
spurgu
[https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E97728_01/E97727/html/vboximg-
mou...](https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E97728_01/E97727/html/vboximg-mount.html)

~~~
ngrilly
Thanks!

But I wonder why the section 6.11 about vboximg-mount is missing on the .org
version of the manual:

[https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06.html](https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06.html)

------
excalibur
"You are already running the most recent version of VirtualBox." -VirtualBox
5.2.22

------
cat199
> iSCSI: In cases where there is no ambiguity, the LUN of an iSCSI target is
> automatically determined, for targets with non-zero LUNs

Any SAN/Storage admins care to comment on if this is really great or really
scary?

------
Thaxll
What virt solution on win10 has 3d acceleration functional on Ubuntu? The
Unity Ubuntu desktop is dead slow on VirtualBox...

------
amelius
Since this is Oracle, I'm most interested to hear if there have been any
changes in the license.

------
Annatar
Still no Solaris USB fixes after more than five years of busted / non-working
USB pass-through. Good work, great job...

------
zapzupnz
Holy cow, what an ugly user interface. I mean, it wasn't exactly a Matisse
before, but it's just hideous now on macOS.

Who thought "easy to use" rhymed with "make the icons look like nearly
identical and somewhat indistinguishable blue squares"? Who decided that an
already rather unprofessional drawing of Tux needed to be transformed into
Baby's First Vector Drawing™?

And why, when previous versions already did a semi-respectable job of at least
_pretending_ to look like a native Cocoa app on macOS, does version 6 not only
regress its implementation of the Aqua theme down to everything-is-grey but do
so by getting rid of the gradient that emulated NSToolbar on most settings
windows whilst then _adding_ ugly gradients to the list of VM settings on the
main window in place of the vastly more functional rounded rectangles with
separate headers of previous versions?

You see, if it's possible to regress the user interface so badly _when it was
already fine_, I don't hold much hope for the rest of the technology. Call me
a snob, but it reeks of sloppiness.

~~~
jf-
Exactly the kind of nitpicking negativity I expected to see when I opened the
thread. It’s an app for running VMs, not a piece of consumer software, it’s
not being marketed based on how it looks. Say what you will about oracle’s
business practises, but it’s a crying shame that this is the top comment.

Edit: _was_ top comment. Crying shame averted.

~~~
slantyyz
>> It’s an app for running VMs, not a piece of consumer software

On Macs, Fusion and Parallels are arguably consumer software. In the early
days of x86 on Mac, they were the carrot to lure a lot of non-technical people
who used Windows at work to get a Mac.

Since there are a lot of people who gravitate towards "free as in beer"
software, you can't _not_ expect a Mac user to at least look at VirtualBox as
a consumer app. There are probably plenty of Mac oriented listicles that
recommend VirtualBox as a free option for running Windows VMs on Mac.

~~~
secabeen
Yep. We're in the edu space, and we regularly recommend VBox to Mac users who
want to run a single Windows application on their Mac. Fusion and Parallels
are both better, but for intermittent use, free VBox wins out over $80-$100
Fusion/Parallels.

------
throwaway77384
Is the link down for anyone else?

