Virtualbox 3D progress has been unfortunately slow for a long time. It was kind of anticipated with Oracle's acquisition, as their laser focus on legal engagements and consulting pushes a lot of technical projects to the back burner.
I'd love to see a bit more alignment between VirtualBox and Qemu. Even though KVM and Qemu's virtualized graphics acceleration is still a WIP, having a shared code base could accelerate the project on things like SPICE (https://www.spice-space.org/download.html) and Virgl (https://virgil3d.github.io/). Unfortunately, I think it uses a lot of Linux-specific technologies (e.g. KVM, Gallium), so the likelihood of sharing at that level seems pretty low. Although, supposedly Gallium isn't locked into Windows.
Theoretically, if we could agree on a common host-guest interface for a virtual graphics adapter, it could share the guest implementations and host implementations could be added as needed. And it could be reused in multiple projects. But it always seems that this is the tech that never gets sufficient cross-project collaboration. And given the many differences between vendor hardware, a portable interface has been difficult. Maybe Vulkan will provide enough low-level functionality to ease the abstraction?
Without 3d support, basically no-one can use virtualbox, so is the dilemma whether to kill the project or not?
(This is a serious question--what can possibly be more important to average virtualbox users than having a working desktop environment? Virtualbox has always occupied the desktop virtualization niche, so I'm trying to figure out what has changed...)
I use Virtualbox daily without ever using a desktop environment in the VM. It's very useful in headless form for development machines when working locally.
Why do you need 3d acceleration for using a system? GUIs work perfectly without any 3D acceleration. Are you planing on playong games? If so it is not a good idea in any VM.
I have fine desktop environments without 3D. Maybe I'm just totally old-school, but I've never even felt the need for 3D on physical machines. But then, I use VMs mainly with VPN chains and Tor, for isolation and compartmentalization. If I really needed a 3D desktop environment, I'd use a dedicated box, and route through whatever anonymization path needed, using another box as multi-VM router.
It is free (compared to VMWare).
It is easy to start with (compared to, say, Docker)
It allows you to 'simulate' an architecture with multiple machines. Doing it all on one machine will have dependencies you didn't expect (eg shared env, everything localhost).
It allows you to run a server application without cluttering your dev machine.
I don't understand how this is a "dilemma." It's like saying, "on one hand, I really need to mow my lawn. On the other hand, I really don't want to. It's a real dilemma!"
I think it's more akin to a free lawn mowing service that's having trouble cutting new types of grass.
It's like saying "On one hand, we really want to cut your grass for free. On the other hand, cutting new types of grass takes a significant amount of time that we don't have."
I get that it's really nice to have your cake and eat it too, but unless you're paying for said-cake I'm not sure that your critique is very accurate.
They mow the grass on a park that's open to us all to use, but they don't have time to mow that bit over there. They're just asking if anyone else has time to do it instead.
That would work, but perform like caro. There are a large number of effects that need shared memory tricks to work efficiently in X. So, any "modern" desktop is going to be iffy running that way.
For windows, try mobaxterm. I tried a half dozen x11 servers a few years ago, and it was the best by far.
It works great, modulo 3d acceleration. If I remember right, cut and paste work well, so that (plus a file share for Downloads) gets rid of the need to run a web browser in Linux.
Similarly, it can use the windows wm to manage the x11 windows, so you automatically bypass the linux compositor.
[edit: Also, Hyper-V is extremely fast in this type of setup, because they focus on server performance, and this workload looks like any other network/io intensive server]
In some ways, many Linux beginners will choose to use VirtualBox to learn knowledge. If there is no good user experience with graphics hardware acceleration, we may lose many of the open source community supporters.
We switched to lxc for vagrant, it is a amazing both for GPU support, speed of startup, and low memory usage. Would never go back to running full VMs via VB or VMware.
You could wait years for some 3D support in VB, or you could just side step the problem and go with lxc.
Same. These days, I usually use my Linux system in a Windows host with raw-disk passthrough and VirtualBox. I've tinkered with the 3D acceleration but all it's done is break things for me.
My experiments with VMWare show that while it does well on some things that VBox struggles with, it has its own areas of weakness/slowness, essentially making it a wash.
When I redo my system in the next few months, I plan on doing a Xen setup with GPU passthrough to Windows and then using Linux in parallel instead of hosted out of VBox.
For the Vagrant VMWare support, are you using the official (paid) Vagrant provider or something else? I've been interested in hearing about experiences of using it.
I tried running Arch Linux on both VirtualBox and VMware Player on my Windows machine at work and Compton's performance is terrible. It's strange because it runs so well on VMware Fusion on my MacBook. Can someone recommend a better way to virtualize Linux desktop with composition in Windows?
I was at one point trying to get GPU passthrough working with LXC and I could never get programs to actually run. Ubuntu 16.04, CUDA 7.5 or maybe 8.0, and a cheap GTX 730.
Maybe I'll have to try again. I was also trying this so that I could run my desktop environment in a container too.
[+] [-] justabystander|9 years ago|reply
I'd love to see a bit more alignment between VirtualBox and Qemu. Even though KVM and Qemu's virtualized graphics acceleration is still a WIP, having a shared code base could accelerate the project on things like SPICE (https://www.spice-space.org/download.html) and Virgl (https://virgil3d.github.io/). Unfortunately, I think it uses a lot of Linux-specific technologies (e.g. KVM, Gallium), so the likelihood of sharing at that level seems pretty low. Although, supposedly Gallium isn't locked into Windows.
Theoretically, if we could agree on a common host-guest interface for a virtual graphics adapter, it could share the guest implementations and host implementations could be added as needed. And it could be reused in multiple projects. But it always seems that this is the tech that never gets sufficient cross-project collaboration. And given the many differences between vendor hardware, a portable interface has been difficult. Maybe Vulkan will provide enough low-level functionality to ease the abstraction?
[+] [-] hedora|9 years ago|reply
(This is a serious question--what can possibly be more important to average virtualbox users than having a working desktop environment? Virtualbox has always occupied the desktop virtualization niche, so I'm trying to figure out what has changed...)
[+] [-] emeraldd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|9 years ago|reply
What? I can only laugh at such a statement
Don't use hyped up desktop managers that need 3D to work.
[+] [-] noselasd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krzyk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dylan16807|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nomercy400|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Buge|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hamburglar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChristianBundy|9 years ago|reply
It's like saying "On one hand, we really want to cut your grass for free. On the other hand, cutting new types of grass takes a significant amount of time that we don't have."
I get that it's really nice to have your cake and eat it too, but unless you're paying for said-cake I'm not sure that your critique is very accurate.
[+] [-] simonh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamlayers|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petecox|9 years ago|reply
Perhaps Oracle and Microsoft (WSL) can collaborate on supporting an X11 server (ones already exist) for Windows 10.
[+] [-] emeraldd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hedora|9 years ago|reply
It works great, modulo 3d acceleration. If I remember right, cut and paste work well, so that (plus a file share for Downloads) gets rid of the need to run a web browser in Linux.
Similarly, it can use the windows wm to manage the x11 windows, so you automatically bypass the linux compositor.
[edit: Also, Hyper-V is extremely fast in this type of setup, because they focus on server performance, and this workload looks like any other network/io intensive server]
[+] [-] skratlo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eshizhan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpncrunch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tcrews|9 years ago|reply
If you need 3D support in a VM on your workstation, use VMware Workstation 12... it's awesome (but Vagrant support sucks).
[+] [-] bhouston|9 years ago|reply
You could wait years for some 3D support in VB, or you could just side step the problem and go with lxc.
[+] [-] cookiecaper|9 years ago|reply
My experiments with VMWare show that while it does well on some things that VBox struggles with, it has its own areas of weakness/slowness, essentially making it a wash.
When I redo my system in the next few months, I plan on doing a Xen setup with GPU passthrough to Windows and then using Linux in parallel instead of hosted out of VBox.
[+] [-] scw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eshizhan|9 years ago|reply
https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/11574
[+] [-] harrygeez|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robinduckett|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrmondo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhouston|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mynewtb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ansible|9 years ago|reply
I was at one point trying to get GPU passthrough working with LXC and I could never get programs to actually run. Ubuntu 16.04, CUDA 7.5 or maybe 8.0, and a cheap GTX 730.
Maybe I'll have to try again. I was also trying this so that I could run my desktop environment in a container too.