Review of Sun's Free Open Source Virtual Machine

goombah99 writes "After snapping up virtualization company InnoTek at the beginning of the year, Sun has recently released VirtualBox as a fully functional and highly polished free GPL open source x86 Virtual Machine. It can host 32- or 64-bit Linux, Windows XP Vista and 98, OpenSolaris and DOS. It runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix platforms. The download is just 27MB. A review of it on MacWorld, showing HD movies playing inside windows XP on a mac, demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware. Like its competition, it can run other OSes in rootless, rooted, or seamless modes display modes (where all the applications have their windows mixed at the same time). Each VM instance can only run single core (though I/O is multi-core), and it does not yet support advanced windows graphics libraries however, so some gamers may be disappointed. Slashdot discussed the InnoTek acquisition earlier.

InnoTek?

Umm, yeah. Did you get the memo?

Re:InnoTek?

No I'm over at Penitrode now. did the place burn down or something?

Mentions comparible speeds to VMware...

In my experience, I've actually found VirtualBox to be much faster than VMware, and coupled with the far less demanding system requirements (at least for the VM software itself, it doesn't do much to reduce guest sys requirements, of course :P), I haven't used VMware for over a year and half now.

so what kind of VM is this

Does this thing run the VM as some sort of hypervisor underneath the OS or does it piggyback the other OS's on a parent OS.

If It's a hypervisor like thing where all the OS's' are symmetric then I guess it must be getting in the way of my "normal" OS and limiting it to single core?

If it's not a hypervisor/symmetric VM and one OS is the master, Do all the OS's have full access to the hardware functions. So for example if I my mac is the master OS, and I set up a firewall set, does the windows OS have to go through the mac's firewall (and thus be protected better) or does it have direct access to the ports itself. If the latter who negotiates the conflicts when both want the CD or audio port.

Finally, are the VMs portabel from machine to machine. Or even platform to platform.

So If I create a VM on one machine, save it's state and open it on another machine, does it just run? (even the network settings?) What if the second machine was say an AMD and the first an Intel. What if the first host was a mac and the second host a linux machine?

Wow!

Free, GPL AND open source? All in one package? However do they do it?!

Darkhorse

It looks like a viable candidate for a VM, but still a bit behind the leaders. VMWare and Parallels seem to be better choices if you can afford them, but hopefully being free as in beer and GPL will allow it to catch up rapidly and make the ongoing competition even better. If they can get 3D graphics card support running, I will be looking really hard at VirtualBox.

Binaries not Free

 2 Grant of license. (1) Sun grants you a personal right to install and execute the Product on a Host Computer for Personal Use or Educational Use or for Evaluation. âoePersonal Useâ requires that you use the product on the same Host Computer where you installed it yourself and that no more than one client connect to that Host Computer at a time for the purpose of displaying Guest Computers remotely. âoeEducational useâ is any use in an academic institution (schools, colleges and universities, by teachers and students). âoeEvaluationâ means testing the product for a reasonable period (that is, normally for a few weeks); after expiry of that term, you are no longer permitted to evaluate the Product.

The binaries are not Free for corporate use. The source is free (GPL) but good fucking luck compiling it on a windows machine. Maybe you could compile it on a linux machine but on windows it assumes a development environment complete with every freakin' thing under the Sun (no pun intended). I gave up after two days of trying to get it to work.

Re:Binaries not Free

You're already using Windows -- what's so odd about buying a license?

Contribution from non-FOSS users?

It's not odd that they want to charge for their product, it's odd that they charge for the binaries, but not the source. That's the odd thing.

It's not odd if you look at it from a contribution standpoint.

The FOSS community contributes to VirtualBox directly through help with development, testing and bug fixing on the project, as well as indirectly through their efforts on all the other FOSS projects upon which VirtualBox depends, including toolchains and mountains of utilities. Availability of source code is clearly not optional for this.

Windows binary users get a bit of a free ride on the back of all that hard work, so instead they contribute to VirtualBox by providing a bit of cash. They don't need access to the source code nor a build environment for this, and what's more, in the Windows environment it's very normal and expected to pay for your packages.

So, the VirtualBox product offering seems quite well adjusted to its two communities, and quite fair as well.

Re:Binaries not Free

See, this is one part where a package management tool comes in handy. For example, the binaries that are provided by Sun are not free, BUT when Debian takes the GPL'd source, and makes a .deb file, it is free.

I like that bussiness model

That bussiness model seems pretty fair to me. Release the code GPL, free binaries for non commerical use, and sell the binaries for corporate clients. They are essentially charging companies for the time and expertise it takes to compile it. And presumably it means they only have to offer support to paying corprorate customers.

A nice thing about that model is that it caps the price at the value added. Think sun is charging too much? compile it yourself and support it yourself. The value contained in the code itself, and value added to the code by unpaid GPL contributors, is not part of the price this way.

And that's a very nice way to make money off GPL. You're not cheating the contributors at all. And anyone can go into competition with sun for the compiling. So it comes down to charging for the value added by sun in compiling and servicing it.

Not quite the same as RedHat's model but highly simmilar

Re:Binaries not Free

The binaries are not Free for corporate use. The source is free (GPL) but good fucking luck compiling it on a windows machine. Maybe you could compile it on a linux machine but on windows it assumes a development environment complete with every freakin' thing under the Sun (no pun intended). I gave up after two days of trying to get it to work.

Go recursive / self-hosted build. You could always set up a VirtualBox VM with the appropriate development environment to build VirtualBox :-)

It get's even better - the source *won't* compile

I too ran into this problem where I wanted the OSE (Open Source Edition) GPL binaries on Windows. I already had Visual Studio installed, so that wasn't a big deal, but one of the requirements to build is having the MinGW g++ compiler, so now you have a situation where you need two seperate c++ compilers to compile the thing, which is kind of wierd. On top of that you need to download and install the DirectX SDK and the Windows Driver Kit, along with several open source libraries (ok, needing various library dependencies is kind of of par for the course though).

After finally getting everything downloaded and unpacked into a build tree, and getting all the command line arguments for their configure script (so it would know where to find all the libraries), the build process ran for about 1/2 hour then died with a type casting error related to the USB device driver. Now, according to the VirtualBox website, the USB wasn't even supposed to be part of the Open Source Edition (and I suspect that might be part of why I got the errors - because it was expecting it and it wasn't there).

I asked on the VirtualBox forums and developer mailing list, and after a week someone said that they got it to build by commenting out the 2 lines that generated the build error. But now I'm *very afraid*. A Debian developer who 'got rid of build errors' by commenting out 2 very critical lines of source code put hundreds of thousands or millions of users in jeopardy (because of weak SSL keys generated with insufficient randomness). I have no idea what the long term effects of commenting out those two lines of code are, so I wouldn't be comfortable distributing the OSE binaries I built to anyone anyhow.

On that topic - I'm not sure whether *any* binaries built of VirtualBox could legally be distributed under the GPL, anyhow - I'm worried about the fact that it depends on the DirectX SDK and Windows Driver Kit - would the terms of either of those 'poison' the binaries?

I should, I suppose, mention that it's possible that since the version of the source that I downloaded, the VBox developers may have fixed the compile issue, but the whole thing just reeks of trying to appear to be GPL, while making it practically impossible for most users (on Windows, at least) to get it working from source, starting with the fact that you can't compile it on Windows without Visual C++, and continuing on to the un-compilability of the source code version which was released at the time I tried to build the binaries ( about a month ago ).

Works for me

I've been using the non-GPL version since before Sun acquired them to run XP-only work software under Linux on an 1.5GHz Athlon, with decent performance.

The weird thing is that the boot time for XP in the virtual machine is shorter than on the real one.

Re:Works for me

What would be so odd about that? With a real XP install a cold boot has to go through A) The BIOS (about 3-4 seconds) B) The bootloader (depends) and C) The actual boot up. With a VM you only have to do C. And that isn't including any tweaks that the VM authors have done to speed up XP.

Re:Works for me

Virtual machines have their own [very fast] BIOS and bootloader. The only exception is when you run a Linux kernel from an intelligent tool like QEMU/KVM or Xen which can load a kernel from the host and inject it into the virtual machine to boot the guest.

The fact remains that real devices have warmup sequences which cannot be altogether avoided. The closest the world has come to VM-like booting is LinuxBIOS, which cuts down the device initialisation to the point that Linux can boot on top almost instantly, just like in a virtual machine.

A Good VM

I find this to be an excellent VM that continues to make a lot of progress. After using VMWare server, Bochs, and QEmu, this one really takes the cake on both performance and usability. Virtual machines are easy to set up using a nice graphical interface, and all of the bells and whistles require no extensive configuration (sound, mouse integration). Running a Gentoo hardened Linux on amd64? No problem. Some of the features that really put VirtualBox above the rest for me:

• Intel E1000 Support.
• Seamless window integration for popular OSes
• Shared folders
• VT-x/AMD-V and PAE/NX Support
• Headless support

Best of all, it's FOSS.

Sun

Sun has consistently appeared to be one of the largest corporate supporters of OSS, and their hardware is rock solid, yet they seem to get bashed every time they come up. It seems like they've been busy giving away the keys to the castle so to speak, but it never seems to be enough. What does everybody have against Sun?

Re:Sun

Sun has consistently appeared to be one of the largest corporate supporters of OSS, and their hardware is rock solid, yet they seem to get bashed every time they come up... What does everybody have against Sun?

Personally, I appreciate Sun's OSS work. I do understand some of the sentiment though. Sun often seems to be a day late and a dollar short in their OSS ventures. They waited to release OpenSolaris under a reasonable OSS license until Linux had completely dominated that niche. Ditto with many other technologies. Even now, it is a real pain in the butt to actually get a copy of OpenSolaris and install it as a normal user. They make you install a proprietary download manager and give them a bunch of personal info. On almost all of their projects, developers not working at Sun complain about how hard it is to get changes and contributions added to those projects, because of all the red tape. Sun's OSS motto might be "we'll do OSS if we have no other option, and then we'll make it annoying". In this case they've made the binaries for this project unavailable for corporate users in a clear attempt to try to make things artificially hard so they can make money on unnecessary service contracts, instead of making it easy and concentrating on service contracts where they can provide real value (the former strategy often resulting in lesser adoption of their projects, to the detriment of said project).

I'd like to stress that I do appreciate their work. Unlike another person replying, I have no problem with their creating and profiting from both proprietary and OSS projects. They just are a big business that despite being a large OSS contributor, does not play very well with individuals or the OSS community as a whole. It leaves a lot of us personally frustrated with them when we expect them to behave like other big OSS contributors. Heck, even Apple is easier to collaborate with.

Re:Sun

The short answer is that Sun won't get on the Linux bandwagon.

The slightly longer answer is that they are actually trying to compete with Linux. And some people will even say that Solaris is, in some ways, better than Linux. That's apostasy of the highest order for the Slashdot crowd.

A longer answer still is that most people on Slashdot are probably exposed to the worst of Sun as part of their jobs: the 10-year old behemoths. They haven't been updated in years (if ever). You can't buy parts for them, and even if you could, they're a bitch to work with because they weigh a million pounds. You spend a large part of your day just trying to keep them shuffling off this mortal coil for just a few more days. And you still often get calls about them in the middle of the night. Then you turn to your fellow admin, the guy who runs 100 shiny new Dells with RHEL5. Who has 100 times as many servers as you, but spends his entire day reading Slashdot. And you burn with hate for Solaris. It's not fair -- a 10-year old Linux box is going to be in a far worse state than a 10-year old Sun box -- but it is the way people think.

I guess the really short answer is: "A lot of reasons, none of them very good."

Re:Sun

Sun was a proprietary vendor for quite a long time. Practically the whole reason that they take so long between announcing something is going to be open source (eg, Solaris and Java) and actually getting it into the public, is auditing the entire source tree to make sure they don't release some component licensed from some other company when they're not supposed to do that.

performace

"demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware"

what? i have been running vmware on my linux workstation at work for years and recently switched to virtualbox and realized that virtualbox is in orders of magnitude snappier, faster and less ressource-intensive than vmware.

just the fact that mouse support works absolutely flawless in vb is an enormous advantage over vmware. i am not even going into how much i/o wait vmware seemed to cause all the time which vb simply doesn't (yes the settings are comparable:>)

NEVER will i go back to vmware again (at least not on the desktop)

straight on to boing boing

So, can I run my xbox through it? I need to be able to run simultaneously:
1) xbox halo
2) mac for screen grabs and skype
3) red hat terminals for server access
4) windows for outlook and skype

Plus, I need to be able to take screen grabs in any one of these virtual environments and save them into one or more of the others.

Bonus points if it has 'arrange by penis' for the desktop environments.

benchmark information

for benchmark information about virtualbox vs kvm vs vmware workstation, you might be interested in http://dipconsultants.com/press/24508-1/ [dipconsultants.com]

Re:it was released before sun bought it

True. VirtualBox was GPL2'd in January 2007, Sun acquired InnoTek in February 2008 (source [wikipedia.org]). So it was actually InnoTek, not Sun, who released VirtualBox into the wild in the first place. :-)