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Desktop Hypervisors Are Like Buses: None for Ages, Then Four at Once (theregister.com) 34

Posted by msmash from the when-it-rains dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: September has been a big month for desktop hypervisors, with the field's big players all delivering significant updates. Oracle delivered VirtualBox version 7.1, billed as a major upgrade thanks to its implementation of a UI with a "modernized look and feel, offering a selection between Basic and Experienced user level with reduced or full UI functionality."

[...] Parallels also released a desktop hypervisor update last week. Version 20 of the eponymous tool now offers a VM that's packed with tools developers may find handy as they work on generative AI applications. Among those tools are the Docker community edition, lmutils, the OpenCV computer vision library, and the Ollama chatbot interface for AI models. [...] The other big player in desktop hypervisors is VMware, with its Fusion and Workstation products for macOS and Windows respectively. Both were recently updated.
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Desktop Hypervisors Are Like Buses: None for Ages, Then Four at Once More

Desktop Hypervisors Are Like Buses: None for Ages, Then Four at Once

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  • VMware is the only hypervisor with decent graphics performance. Last I looked VirtualBox was better than KVM/QEMU, but way way way behind VMware.

    It would be nice if VirtualBox had decent graphics, it would make it almost useful.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by zekica ( 1953180 )
      On Linux, VirtManager with virgl/spice has great OpenGL performance as long as:
      • You use Wayland on both host and guest
      • You use Linux as a guest

      Interestingly, running QEMU directly with 3d acceleration works fine on either combination of X11/Wayland

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        That kind of defeats the point, usually the improved graphics performance is needed to do things like run games or do work on another OS (Windows).

        • Yes. Photoshop is painful to use through QXL. Most games are impossible (except for strictly 2D stuff, which is only just bad due to poor fill rate.) QXL is a ton better than no acceleration and I'm thankful that it exists for free, but that doesn't stop me from wishing for something that provides highly compatible and performant 3d graphics support for QEMU VMs like you get with Wine these days. vmplayer has surprisingly good 3d graphics support, but I don't want to use it any more (and haven't for a while

      • That is interesting. It invites the question: why would you add Redhat's layer of bugs and questionable design decisions on top of QEMU/KVM when the latter works better on its own?

    • Use rdp. Even for Linux I've found running xrdp and accessing the machine that way to be faster than the vm console.

    • I have some bad news for you: the future of VMWare is ... well, not bright.

      The backstory is that they got acquired by Broadcom, and Broadcom's modus operandi is to buy up companies with customers addicted to their products, then jack up the price for those products ... while massively slashing headcount. The recent lawsuit from AT&T against them (featured here a few days ago) is just one manifestation of that playbook.

      This has worked great for Broadcom as a company (they soak the existing customers for

      • Since I hang out here like all the time, I've participated in discussions about vmware in which all of that was discussed, and more.

        But what was also discussed (because I brought it up) is that windows guests on linux hosts have pretty decent 3d graphics support.

        I'd like to see that happen for QEMU in particular, since that's what I use these days for virtualization on my Linux system.

  • There are others, in case you're interested (Score:4, Informative)

    by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @01:58PM (#64793555)
    In the BSD world we have NVMM (NetBSD also as Xen), VMM (OpenBSD), and Bhyve. They've all been updated recently and all work pretty well. Few are very "desktop" oriented. However, I'd also recommend folks check out DOSBOX-X [dosbox-x.com]. Which is my favorite emulator/hypervisor. It's a really nice GUI around DOSBOX and it works on a large number of platforms.

    • Taking a play from another area.

      These desktop hypervisors / VMs / BSD Jail equivalents should by goals

      1) Isolate the hosted software from the OS, filesystem, registry (windows), OS directories, common binary directories (/user/bin, C:\Windows), etc and prevent modification of or installation of binaries, data files, config files there
      2.) Isolate the hosted software from common components and common areas (Windows Com and registry)
      3) Give hosted software the illusion of its own application binary directory

      • What might be nice is to do like what Thinstall did and give options like having the app able to see everything on the machine... but all writes would be redirected to a safe area, and there would be network firewalling and such at the hypervisor layer to ensure it couldn't communicate to a C&C center. This would allow apps that have not been vetted to have the ability to do stuff, but not foul up the system.

        Thinstall also offered degrees of isolation, from a 100% full view of the OS to just the minimu

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Windows has Hyper-V as well. It's actually a bit of a pain because Windows uses it for some stuff (security, WSL) so you really need to use it with VirtualBox or performance will be terrible. Unfortunately it has some major limitations with passing through hardware and no sound at all.

      The update to VirtualBox concerns me. UI changes are a crapshoot. I guess I'll find out sooner or later.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by GoTeam ( 5042081 )
        Some of us have to use SCVMM. It works great as long as you aren't to hung up on performance or security... ugh

      • Same with VMWare. If Credential Guard, Windows Sandbox or other things which are vital to security are enabled, VMWare's own hypervisor tends to not be used, but it uses Hyper-V instead.

        On Macs, pretty much all VM software is a front-end to Apple's virtualization framework, which is a hypervisor built into macOS.

        Linux, anything goes. KVM is probably one of the better ones, but Oracle's isn't bad either. Xen and others are solid as well.

    • Also, z/VM 7.3 was released about two years ago.

      • I read the release notes. "Up to eight members in an SSI cluster" That's sweet. Single System Image clustering is underrated.

  • Do any of these do Intel on Apple Silicon? (Score:3)

    by jddj ( 1085169 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @02:01PM (#64793575) Journal

    I realize that'd be emulators vs. hypervisors, but interested. macOS has an intel emulation layer...

    • Apple Silicon has its own flavors of the Hypervisor and Virtualization frameworks. Parallels sits on top of these and its performance is outstanding. My little MacBook Air with its M1 runs Windows 11 flawlessly.
      • Realized I didn't fully answer your question. Yes, Windows Intel apps run well under Windows for ARM using Microsoft's Intel emulation, same emulation used on their bespoke ARM machines.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jddj ( 1085169 )

          Fantastic, thanks!

          After your first comment, I was already looking at the Parallels site, which doesn't explicitly answer the question either: Shows you can run parallels on ARM or Intel, but doesn't say explicitly whether you can emulate a different CPU architecture. At least noplace I saw on the site.

          And it can import my Fusion stuff. Even better!

          Made my day, thanks!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jddj ( 1085169 )

          So...after purchasing and installing and doing handsprings trying to migrate my old VMWare fusion images in...no. It doesn't.

          What Parallels _will_ do is run an ARM version of Windows 11. But that's not running my previously-created Intel machines.

          Back to the drawing board.

      • Second that. Win 11 runs way faster on my macbook M1 with parallels than on the latest windows laptops.

        And parallels has done a much better job integrating cross OS features like seamless access to folders, devices, clipboard etc in both OS's than VMWare, which has been my favorite till windows hyper-v came up.

        Though when I run benchmarks some windows laptops exceed the macbook win11 numbers but due to faster disk speeds etc the overall experience is better enough that i even gave up the touch & pen fun

      • Is that an ARM Windows?

    • UTM has modes to both virtualize (same architecture) and emulate (different architecture). It's based off of QEMU. It's also one of the few free ones that makes it easy to run a macOS guest on an Apple silicon macOS host.

  • VMware Workstation (Score:3)

    by ebonum ( 830686 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @02:21PM (#64793655)

    Umm. It isn't on this list of products:
    https://www.vmware.com/product... [vmware.com]

    I have a log in for VMware.com. It doesn't work.

    I when try to upgrade ("Check for upgrades" was free within dot releases ) from 17.5.2 to 17.6 and it sends me to:
    https://store.cloudvista.com/ [cloudvista.com]
    It wants me to subscribe to something called "VMware Desktop Hypervisor Pro".

    This is a hot mess. I think it's time to move to something else. Plus, in VMware 17.5.2 copying and pasting to/from Windows 10 and Ubuntu only works for the first 5-10 minutes after a reboot. They never did fix it.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by vux984 ( 928602 )

      https://www.vmware.com/product... [vmware.com]

      To fair, it was not easy to find. The big button link to desktop hypervisors in the product menu is only visible if your running > 1920x1080p and the window is big enough... ... or you ... scroll down while the popup product menu is open.

    • I rode the same merry go round when I tried to upgrade Fusion after the Broadcom purchase. They've done an awful job of handling the transition.

  • https://mac.getutm.app/
    https://github.com/utmapp/UTM

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by davidwr ( 791652 )

      I had the same question. Then I looked closely: VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion count separately.

      In some languages, "con" means "with."

      So you could call it Workstation "con" Fusion.

  • "Oracle delivered VirtualBox version 7.1, billed as a major upgrade thanks to its implementation of a UI with a "modernized look and feel"" VirtualBox 7.1 is an unfortunate step in the wrong direction. I happily used the last 6.x release until it wouldn't run on Linux anymore. 7.0 was crashy and unreliable and while 7.1 doesn't seem to be as crashy, the UI is way too 'busy'. Being able to scroll though the settings instead of clicking tabs is good, but the styling of the UI elements is just too over-the
  • I use Proxmox with PCI-E Passthrough and no display set in Proxmox and it works great for Photoshop and games. I can always remote into it via RDP or some kind of ethernet based KVM that supports the resolution/refresh rate and it would be fine. With this set up I don't see any issue with graphics on Linux based hypervisors.

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