Virtualbox 3.2.0 Beta 1 released, experimental OS X Guests | Hacker News Reader

Virtualbox 3.2.0 Beta 1 released, experimental OS X Guests

forums.virtualbox.org

58 pointsazim33 comments

You forgot to mention the other HUGE addition that I know I've been waiting on for years... Multiple monitor support!

I use VirtualBox as my dev environment every day and I know I'll be more productive when I can use both my monitors for development again. :)

Unfortunately, it's kind of a deal-breaker that each Mac OS X guest burns 100% CPU all the time. This is mentioned in the new user guide as something which will be fixed in a future release.

"Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)"

Awesome. I'm definitely not a VM expert, but I think that means I can fire up my VM, and if not much is running in it, it won't consume as much memory on the host. Is that correct?

I think it means you can increase the RAM of a VM without shutting it down. With Xen, the VM needs to be rebuilt (a couple of minutes off)

Memory ballooning is basically a mechanism for hypervisor to steal pages from the guest and yes, so it allows for over-commitment. Memory balloon driver is present inside the guest and hypervisor communicates how many pages it needs back to the driver. The driver allocates pages and sends it back to the hypervisor.

I believe it's just memory overcommitment, so you can assign more memory than you actually have available on the host and it will dynamically handle it for you. Crazy stuff, though.

The balloon driver, as others have pointed out, is used in an overcommit scenario as a way for the hypervisor to reclaim memory from a guest OS. There's a balloon driver loaded in to the guest which can communicate with the hypervisor. When the hypervisor needs more physical memory, it can ask a guest's balloon driver to inflate and start allocating physical memory pages. That will cause the guest to start reclaiming unused memory using it's native techniques; a Linux guest, for example, might destroy unused file buffer caches. The balloon driver can then release all the memory it's allocated and the guest won't bother reclaiming anything until it needs it.

Ever since I bought my rarely-used Mac Mini, I've wished I could just drop OS X on my super-beefy Linux+Windows development machine. I hate having to have two keyboards, a monitor with two inputs, two mice or a switch, just to use OS X once in a while. And there's no way I'm giving up my model M for development.

You can use synergy to share keyboard / mouse between Linux, Windows and OSX. I use it between an Ubuntu desktop and a MacBook Pro. http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

My download is timing out at 419 KB, anyone else having problems?

Mine is at 428 KB. :P

Which file are you downloading? I'm trying virtualbox-3.2_3.2.0~beta1-60785~Ubuntu~lucid_i386.deb

I downloaded the Guest Additions without problems.

Yes, same here, at 996 KB.

Try using wget or curl. Chrome hung for me, but wget downloaded the 70MB file in about 30 seconds.

Tried wget, no luck. No worries, I'll try later, should really get back to work :)

Is Guest OS X, on VMs legal? I thought that was the against Apples terms of service.

I never really found out what happened to the whole PsyStar thing.

IANAL, but as far as I understand, their EULA is sympathetic to running OS X on Apple hardware. So if you're running VirtualBox on OS X already, it might be alright with apple.

Depends on the country, as I understand it. Some countries like Germany allow it (prohibit Apple from certain terms in the license) , while other places (USA) it would be against license terms (I won't say illegal as that implies criminality; it would be a civil violation).

It is illegal to run OS X on a hardware not made by Apple, I guess it's fine to run it as a guest in a VM (the old Mac-on-Linux did that), although I can be wrong as well.

It is not illegal, to my knowledge no court has ruled on the matter and the only judgment (PYSTAR) that even remotely relates to OSX on no apple hardware and it had to do with copyright violations. Copyright protects distribution and public display of the media not the use of the private use of media. Companies have tried to blur this line by expanding what copyright encompass. If they want it to be illegal they need to provide a crypto key at the hardware layer that the software communicates with, as breaking cryptography does violate several laws.

Okay, thanks for the clarification, I wrote my original commentary without much caution, the user just not followed the EULA, that what I wanted to say, which to my knowledge is illegal in my country.

There are countries where the EULA clause that restricts what you can do with the software is void.

Brazil (where I live) is one example.

Thanks for the information, I'm Brazilian as well, I will study more about the legal situation, someone that worked in a large software industry here in Brazil (he is trustworthy), told me that it is illegal, I have to look further and not take for granted what people say to me.

You're legally only allowed to run OS X Server virtualized on Apple hardware. VMware and Parallels have both implemented checks in their products to help Apple enforce this (although I believe they're somewhat trivial to work around).

AFAICT VirtualBox does nothing to enforce it.

I can only hope the OS X support will work in Windows 7 x64.

My desktop is a monster of a machine, my 2,1 revision MacBook Pro, not so much.

Who tried it? How well did it work?

I think its important to note that this release does not work on Windows 7 x64. Link to known issues: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=30325

Otherwise, working great so far on Windows XP for me.

So far, so good, but it's still got 30 minutes to go..

http://skitch.com/petercooper/dbe31/virtualbox-os-x-2

So, it finished OK:

http://skitch.com/petercooper/dbjk1/osxundervbox

No hacks either! :-) Had some issues with a dirty disc on the way.. and it totally refused to use an ISO.

Nice!

Apple lawsuit in 3. 2. 1...

On what grounds?

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