Virtualbox Goes OSS

paltemalte writes to tell us that VirtualBox has gone open source. InnoTek released their virtualization product as open source and launched virtualbox.org to help cultivate the community and allow further development of the software.

Destroying your server in 4 easy steps.

1. Use full-sized images scaled down with HTML as thumbnails on your screenshot page, rather than real thumbnails.
2. Get your site posted on Slashdot.
3. ???
4. PROFIT! (For your web host, at least)

Re:

Yea no joke on this one. There are few instances when this is good idea and this is not one of them. The fact that the width attribute they have is invalid really is not helping either... everything lost its aspect ratio :(. Though, in their defense, they wrote the program so their downfalls in web design may be null and void :)

Bonus points

Bonus points for the screenshots showing it installing a pirate copy of Vista too.

Re:

Vista RC2 was available via several legal methods. Why accuse them of running a pirated version?

A few questions

Just had a look at their site. Interesting that they claim contradictory things. Mainly that state that the source is the 'complete' program but also that their closed binaries have additional features. No .rpm or .spec in the source so I didn't bother to download it yet, certainly sounds like at least having a look at, heck maybe I could contribute a .spec at least. Of course I'll probably have to use a VM to do it because they don't have a stable 64bit host yet. :(

Before doing anything though, is this for real? Has anyone on /. actually used it already and can testify that it runs at good speed and doesn't crap itself every ten minutes?

Can Linux Virtualization Get Any More Fragmented?

My God. We have: Xen, KVM, VMWare, QEMU (with and without KQEMU), User Mode Linux, Win4Lin, Bochs, and now VirtualBox. I'm sure there's others I've missed too.

Re:Can Linux Virtualization Get Any More Fragmente

That's a little unfair. That list represents a wide range of technologies out there, from full virtualization to full emulation, of complete OSes or particular software, and with a spot of OS porting and machine language translation on the side.

Which you use depends on what you want to do - if you're in hosting, Xen, KVM, VMWare, vservers or OpenVZ is probably what you're after. If you're wanting to test software on several OSes, VMWare is probably where it's at, though Xen and probably KVM will serve too. If your OS of choice doesn't run on your hardware, you'll need an emulator like QEmu. Kernel hackers will probably use UML, Qemu or Bochs, whereas those who wish to use windows apps under linux might try Xen, KVM, QEmu, VMWare, Wine, Win4Lin or Cedega depending on various factors.

Various levels of hardware support are also represented. Xen will get you near-native performance, but you'll need an x86 that explicitly supports full virtualization or an OS that's been recompiled for paravirtualization. QEmu, on the other hand, will let you run windows on a powerpc mac, albeit more slowly.

So, although there's a lot of choice out there, which one you'd actually use depends a lot on what hardware you've got, what OS or progam you want to run, whether you want to use Office, play games, run a variety of OSes or many instances of one, and what's the fastest technique for your particular combination. There's a lot going on, and it's not just about running windows under linux or vice versa.

This isn't linux virtualization

It's just virtualization. The website has screenshots of XP running in a VM under OS/2.

This is an application of some of the simplest principles of computer science.

Basically the idea is that any function that is computable can be computed by a machine that is Turing Complete [wikipedia.org].

The applied corrolary is that anything one program/machine can do, another machine/program can do.

Alan Turing [wikipedia.org] is considered the father of modern computer science (please, no Ada Lovelace flames! I'm not clueless.)

Generally spe

Re:Can Linux Virtualization Get Any More Fragmente

From the perspective of running windows virtualised in linux;

Xen is a pain to setup and manage for a desktop, it's server-orientated. QEMU without KQEMU is dead slow (full virtualisation has its price!), with KQEMU is closed source. KVM is quick with VT processors, but suffers from poor USB support (locks up on my machine), and network performance is slow in both due to lack of paravirtualised network drivers in qemu. UML obviously doesn't run windows. Win4Lin I haven't tried, it isn't free in either sense. Bochs is for much more hardcore situations than running Windows on x86. VMWare on linux - for me - has been awkward to get working fully (USB again) and rather flakey on both gentoo and ubuntu.

Currently KVM shows promise, but it needs a bit more work for me, especially for USB, vesa-resolutions and networking. No doubt in another 6 months, it will be awesome. Indidivual user VMWare software just seems happier running with windows as the host OS.

So far, my testing of virtualbox looks very promising - very fast, VERY nice front end on linux, quick to setup, and the closed source version has some clever RDP features. I think I may finally have found a virtualisation software that lets me sync my PDA to outlook via USB, when running linux as my main OS - my holy grail.

There are lots of different virtualisation projects from total emulators like bochs, to paravirtualised-optimised systems like virtualbox and vmware, to full virtualisation such as qemu and kvm (strictly speaking, kvm is a replacement for kqemu, not qemu itself). I've not heard of virtualbox before, but I'm certainly going to look further into it.

Re:Can Linux Virtualization Get Any More Fragmente

Competition is great. I love competition. But there's this other thing, called co-operation, and us folks in the open source world, we're supposed to be better at co-operation than we are at competition. If just a few of these groups would work together (instead of just pinching stuff from qemu, as most of them do) the technology would be a whole lot better.

Dual model

As a business model, InnoTek publishes two versions [virtualbox.org] - the new GPLed open source, and a binary-only proprietary version with some enhancements:

* The full VirtualBox package is available in binary (executable) form free of charge from the Downloads page. This version is free for personal use and evaluation under the terms of the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License.

If, instead, you wish to purchase licenses for enterprise use and/or enterpris

Freeware?

This is taking "freeware" to another level- Free/Opensource the low-quality version, while requiring people to pay for the "professional" version?

The following list shows the features that are unique to the closed-source edition of VirtualBox. Note that this list may change over time as previously closed source features are made available for the open source version as well.

* Remote Display Protocol (RDP) Server

This component implements a complete RDP server on top of the virtual hardware and allows users to connect to a virtual machine remotely using any RDP compatible client.

* USB support

VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and supports passing through USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 devices to virtual machines.

* USB over RDP

This is a combination of the RDP server and USB support allowing users to make USB devices available to virtual machines running remotely.

* Shared Folders

With the use of Shared Folders, users can share directories on their host system with guest systems.

* iSCSI initiator

VirtualBox contains a builtin iSCSI initiator making it possible to use iSCSI targets as virtual disks without the guest requiring support for iSCSI.

Re:

I wouldn't be too surprised if they didn't actually "let" anyone put those in there (without forking)- they have to have some reason that people would want to pay for the proprietary version. If people edit the source code and ship patches back to them, and they don't like what's in the patches, they won't put it in the app and will force a fork, which is probably bad for everyone involved. This is of course just speculation on my part, and we'll see if they do things honestly or not.

graphic card acceleration

So these guys look like they're targeting desktop use for the most part. So the big thing several players in the commercial space are rushing towards is support for 3D graphics acceleration via the graphics card. VMWare and Parallels are both due to release something usable in the near future. I see nothing about it on their Web site or in the user guide. It seems a strange item to leave out.

Someone needs to explain bittorrent to them

From their download page:

* Note: Even though we provide BitTorrents to allow for easier downloads, we do not currently permit redistribution of the VirtualBox binaries above. See the Licensing FAQ for details. This restriction does not, of course, apply to the Open Source Edition (OSE) below.

Obviously the don't quite get how bittorrent works.

Hardware 3D acceleration?

Note the Windows Vista Aero effects. Either the screenshots are fake or they are first to market with this. Anyone care to comment?

Re:

That would be the Windows Vista Aero Basic theme, which does not require 3D acceleration.

Even this?

http://virtualbox.org/attachment/wiki/Screenshots/ 4-installing.png [virtualbox.org]

Re:Even this?

Those effects are pre-rendered. That window isn't movable.

Trying it now...

I have to admit I hadn't heard of this before, so I thought I'd give a go (with the XP binary download).

Bloody hell! It not only seems to work, it looks pretty fast as well. I'm installing a Fedora 6 on it (hosted on Win XP) as I type. I use VMware (licenced) on other systems and I use VMWare Player on this one (Dell XP thingy) and, so far, VB has impressed me.

The user interface seems to be better thought out than I've encountered in the past (I especially like the ability to blow a virtual machine completely away with little effort) - VMWare, take note.

I'll post again when I've given this instance a bit of a hammering - you know; IP stack handling, cpu loading etc.

Give it a try - it can't hurt. AND their site hasn't shown signs of being slashdotted (err... yet).

Oh, yeah! One last thing. Will those who are whinging about the differences about the binary version and the source version please do two things:

1. Read what they *actually* say about the two versions.
2. STFU!!

I thank you.

Re:

If the license were unconcionable (as are most proprietary software licenses), then it could possibly hurt. You could expose yourself to liability, or tainting. However, the licenses for the propietary-included and free-only versions are both blissfully simple and reasonable. Kudos to Innotek.

Performance vs. VMware, Parallels

Has anyone done any testing comparing different virtualization products recently? I have looked in the past, but I could never find anything scientific enough to be considered as a reliable source.

Re:

Excellent idea!

Well... what are you waiting for?

Disgrace of /. Crowd

Here is a company releasing a virtualization program, all of the sudden and then read all the first 20-30 posts - what a disgrace, complaints about licenses they haven't even read or understood, complaints that "redistribution" via bittorrent - guys, what are you doing?

This is a 270M large source package, have you even took the time SVN it? No! So you all prematurely replying about something you have little to no clue about - educate yourself!

Man, you are a disgrace of OSS movement, every single one who has

Innotek OS/2 ISV

Innotek is an interesting company, one of the last OS/2 venders who have done quite a bit for OS/2. Products include
Porting Virtual PC to OS/2 before MS bought it out (and fixes so virtual PC runs OS/2)
Porting Alsa to OS/2. GPL questions about not releasing the 16 bit interface which the community rewrote and now we have the opensource Uniaud. Sound actually works better here then under Ubuntu.
Lots of work on Odin (think Wine from which much of the code comes from). Unluckily they closed of most of their later developments and there has been questions about whether they are breaking the GPL. Seems they have honoured the letter of the GPL but perhaps not the spirit.
Using Odin ported
Flash 5 (plus an illegal Flash 7 sneaked into the wild)
Java 1.4
Acrobat reader.
Also one of there most important developments (now maintained by the main porter) GCC 3.2.2 along with a new Libc as IBM would not distribute GPL code to build Mozilla.
This allows the Mozilla family to continue to run on OS/2 and many an open source program to build with configure and make.
Innotek libc is now klibc using GCC 3.3.5 and continues to improve.