3D support for X11 guests(virtualbox.org) |
3D support for X11 guests(virtualbox.org) |
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?
(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...)
What? I can only laugh at such a statement
Don't use hyped up desktop managers that need 3D to work.
Anyway, most engineers at work use unity because it is the default, and it is a non-starter without hardware acceleration. We site-licensed vmware, and it seems to work OK.
The last time I checked, the second most common choice is fvwm. It sorta works out of the box and isn't unity. Also, it can run on the big server VM's, unlike unity (there is no 3d acceleration in the server kvm instances...)
Another common choice is to do everything via console, productivity be damned. (There are some highly productive console users, but they tend to put linux on their laptops on day one anyway)
But then, I spend most of my time in vim and localhost web pages.
I hope they get the help they are asking for- I wish I could do it. I think it's a great program and it would be great if it were here for a while.
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.
Perhaps Oracle and Microsoft (WSL) can collaborate on supporting an X11 server (ones already exist) for Windows 10.
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]
If you need 3D support in a VM on your workstation, use VMware Workstation 12... it's awesome (but Vagrant support sucks).
You could wait years for some 3D support in VB, or you could just side step the problem and go with lxc.
I'm assuming that this is LiNux only.
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.
If you are having performance problems with VMware Player and are using either AVG of Avast antivirus then the problem might be the antivirus. See also [0]
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.
Why start a browser there? Is it for testing the web pages in different environments? If not, then wouldn't it be more reasonable to start it on a bare metal (the machine you connect to the VM)?
But it might be my bias, I'm one of those that install Linux on a company laptop on day one :) so I'm most efficient in the console.
In Wayland mode, only if you are very patient. I'm not. Virtualbox support for Wayland is not there.
One person found that turning Avast's Behavior Shield off helped.
But with AVG... wow. AVG ships with a disabled-by-default "Use HW assisted virtualization" option buried in its settings. As in, install AVG and it turns that off systemwide until you turn it back on. Yay!
This is with firefox (they also broke 3d acceleration in linux); chrome is OK, and so is firefox if I force enable video acceleration and ignore the severe visual artifacts.
FWIW, Chrome is still a bit sluggish on a 12 core xeon with no GPU, but it is usable (unlike Firefox on the same VM).
Anyway, I used to get away with no gpu acceleration on my laptop, but it became untenable in ~ dec 2016. It still sorta works on the server-side web browser.
If my VMs can't easily be run on any host from backup they tend to be quite useless at the most critical of times.
As a light user of virtualbox, I get the impression using anything but the gui is really hard compared to other virtualization tools.
For instance, auto-starting raw-disk vms at boot on windows is a pain, and hyper-v is free. Its only real downside is lack of gui support for linux guests.
Similarly, you need to stand up separate backup infrastructures for your desktop and virtualbox, or you will be told "you're doing it wrong" when you try to restore.
I guess I could try to write a script to get a crash-consistent export of running virtualbox vms, but the host file system (btrfs, zfs, etc) already does an adequate job of that, so this is just useless administrative overhead and disk space waste from my point of view.
Anyway, when win8 came out, virtualbox couldn't handle the new start menu, and windows guest vdi was my only remaining use case for it at the time.
It is a shame, VirtualBox was my go-to vm solution for years, specifically for its debian/ubuntu host support (unlike vmware) and good desktop guest support (unlike all the other options).
I've used VBoxManage to create, manage and control VMs on remote headless hosts. And work with VRDC desktops. Easy.
Backup/restore of host system should have nothing to do with VirtualBox. It's just files. But then, I use Debian hosts. For backups, I tend to use LUKS-encrypted SSDs via USB, and just copt the full VM folder. Works perfectly.
IME, you can't.
[0] https://github.com/vagrant-libvirt/vagrant-libvirt#synced-fo...
I see this as a vagrant issue though. It really falls short of its promise of being a dev environment where you "never say 'it works on my machine' again".
why can't you do it in the user space within those VM's, communicating over a network adapter? If you don't care about putting on a raincoat, going outside to the Internet, and launching it up into the cloud, you can just install dropbox and get a sync'd directory without additional work. Obviously this is extra unnecessary overhead, two times, but for your use case you may not care.
you can alternatively roll your own solution though it might take you an hour or two. think about rsync over a local network adapter.
I realize these are hackish solutions but if it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid.
on the plus side you will control that traffic. having directory syncing that breaks the VM abstraction opens leaks due to potential oversights in how it's coded.
if I were in your predicament I would work around it.
The difference between this proper approach, and what you call "hacks" is minimal, and basically a question of packaging. To be clear, I agree that the VM developer should write and package these utilities for every major guest operating system it supports.