Oracle VM VirtualBox 5.2 Is Now Available | Hacker News Reader

Oracle VM VirtualBox 5.2 Is Now Available

blogs.oracle.com

68 pointsnikolay55 comments

  Notable enhancements in this release:
  
  - VM export to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic (OCI Classic) format
  - Automatic, unattended guest OS installation for Oracle VM VirtualBox Virtual Machines
  - Improved Virtual Machine Tools, including a new dynamic interface to manage Virtual Machine configuration and snapshot capabilities
  - New Global Tools handling
    * Virtual Media Manager manages media attributes like size, location, type and description
    * Host Network Manager simplifies managing corresponding networks and their attributes
  - GUI accessibility
    * New GUI icons for VirtualBox on all platforms (Windows, Linux, Oracle Solaris and Mac OS X)
    * Enhanced Virtual Machine Selector
    * Extended audio settings, with the option to enable/disable audio input/output
    * Snapshot Pane updates allow easier management of snapshot attributes, like name and description
  - Audio
    * Device enumeration support for audio backends (optional)
    * Support for host device callbacks (optional) and further enhancements
    * HDA emulation now uses asynchronous data processing in separate threads
  - Storage
    * Support for CUE/BIN images as CD/DVD media including multiple tracks
    * Support for the controller memory buffer feature for NVMe

Just FYI, when you post content like that, it is completely unreadable.

How?

It's formatted monospaced text, its perfectly readable to me.

On my iphone, at least, the monospace section cuts off after ~20 characters and you have to drag back-and-forth to horizontally scroll the rest into view. Landscape mode helps, but not much.

It doesn’t wrap on mobile and you have to scroll horizontally to read it all.

Nor does it wrap in Firefox, so pretty annoying on desktops as well. Unless you're using a large monitor.

It's fixed width at a tiny fraction of the screen width. Reading each line requires manually scrolling from start to end of the line, and then back to the beginning, seeing maybe 2-3 words at a time.

https://i.imgur.com/X3FcvQX.png

This is a tiny CSS fix to simply remove the "width" attribute on code and pre. I wish someone from HN would fix this.

If only this were a website for technical people...

I agree, but that's the only option for posting something structured. I wish HN would give up and implement GitHub Flavored Markdown and allow us to post code snippets, nested lists, etc. Sorry, I do extra effort to convert HTML into comments - maybe I should write a tool instead. I try to always post a comment with release notes and not just an outbound link. It would be great if HN implements https://changelogs.md/ and gives an open to see the changelog without leaving the site.

(on mobile)

Here's the problem:

  @media only screen and (min-width : 390px) and (max-width : 509px) {
    .comment { max-width: 350px; overflow: auto }
    pre { max-width: 260px; }
  }
  @media only screen and (min-width : 510px) and (max-width : 599px) {
    .comment { max-width: 460px; overflow: auto }
    pre { max-width: 340px; }
  }
  @media only screen and (min-width : 600px) and (max-width : 689px) {
    .comment { max-width: 540px; overflow: auto }
    pre { max-width: 400px; }
  }

They are putting max widths on child elements instead of letting the parent control things. It's foolishness.

But then, if you look at the html hacker news generates, it'll put you off your lunch.

Some movement on addressing VirtualBox Shared Folders performance issues would have been really nice to see. Has anyone been able to make it perform well for filesystem intensive (npm install, docker builds, etc.) tasks?

https://www.google.ca/search?q=virtualbox+shared+folders+per...

No. VirtualBox Shared Folders are still slow. I switched to NFS.

So it's readable on mobile without attempting to horizontally scroll in too-small a space...

Notable enhancements in this release:

VM export to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic (OCI Classic) format

Automatic, unattended guest OS installation for Oracle VM VirtualBox Virtual Machines

Improved Virtual Machine Tools, including a new dynamic interface to manage Virtual Machine configuration and snapshot capabilities

New Global Tools handling

* Virtual Media Manager manages media attributes like size, location, type and description

* Host Network Manager simplifies managing corresponding networks and their attributes

GUI accessibility

* New GUI icons for VirtualBox on all platforms (Windows, Linux, Oracle Solaris and Mac OS X)

* Enhanced Virtual Machine Selector

* Extended audio settings, with the option to enable/disable audio input/output

* Snapshot Pane updates allow easier management of snapshot attributes, like name and description

Audio

* Device enumeration support for audio backends (optional)

* Support for host device callbacks (optional) and further enhancements

* HDA emulation now uses asynchronous data processing in separate threads

Storage

* Support for CUE/BIN images as CD/DVD media including multiple tracks

* Support for the controller memory buffer feature for NVMe

Thank you! Honestly, I never read HN on mobile devices, so, I wasn't aware of the issue, and I use Stylish for a dark theme and other enhancements on Chrome, which might be fixing some of the <pre /> issues as well.

Oh, it is a horrible experience on mobile but only for that function. Well, and the coloration but I'm partially colorblind and accept that I'm not a priority.

It's like they did the whole site perfectly and then just screwed that up for no good reason. HN is otherwise perfect, as I'm not counting the colors. Those are okay until they use gray (I think, I am never actually sure) text.

Totally off topic:

I wasn't always colorblind. It happened with age, according to the eye doc. It is so strange never being certain you're seeing colors properly. I didn't realize I was colorblind until people kept pointing out that I was wrong. 'No, David. The curtains are blue, not black.' It led to some amusing confrontations.

Anyhow, other than that, HN is pretty much perfect on mobile.

I think I mentioned once in HN how I flashed a few times a home router, with a failed result each time (red led). Then my brother walked by and saved me from my misery telling me that the led is actually orange-greenish which means that the flashing was successful.

I had a support guy fly cross - country for the same reason (I was seeing red leds on a key switch while they were orange)

FYI this will break the current version of Vagrant if you use the VirtualBox provider (which is default): https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/9080

Ugh figures I read that after updating.

I searched the release notes and manual but couldn't find an answer. Does anyone know if this release fixes the problem of not cleanly shutting down the guest OS when the Windows host does an automated update/reboot? It's really annoying to have Windows run an update overnight and see that it did a dirty shutdown of my Linux dev instance guest.

Virtualbox has a "save state" option. It would be nice if it would perform a "save state" on all guests when the host reboots.

This strikes me as a windows issue, not a VirtualBox one. How does windows kill applications that have not exited, how long does it wait to do so, etc?

The VirtualBox process is notified of Windows shutdown and power management events. It can choose to save the state or "power down" the guest OS. There is a setting to manage the default action to take, but it doesn't seem to work reliably.

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#idm9348

I wonder if its taking too long to save state, so windows kills the process and proceeds with its reboot

That's probably it, Windows 10 is incredibly aggressive in killing applications when rebooting for an update. In corporate settings it's even worse, we're currently having a glitch where, no matter what our administrators specify as policy, computers will just randomly reboot sometime after Patch Tuesday for a reboot. Without notification, without a chance to save your work. Just poof.

Given that Oracle seems to have the midas shit touch (RIP John Dunsworth), does anyone have suggestions on Virtualbox alternatives? VMWare is the obvious one I guess.

It's great that they have released 5.2 and that they are adding new things. Virtualbox is a handy tool for me and I'm just afraid one day soon Oracle will turn it to shit.

Use apps that use your native OS virtualization (Hyper-V, KVM, Docker for Mac/xhyve, etc). Bonus: Less driver crashes, better security and peaceful coexistence of different virtualization apps.

> peaceful coexistence of different virtualization apps

Not sure how this works elsewhere but in Windows land I've only ever been able to get one hypervisor per reboot.

I was thinking of Docker for Windows and the stock Hyper-V VM UI.

On Linux, I've been using kvm with libvirt and virt-manager as the GUI.

+1 to this. KVM and virt-manager Just Work for me on Debian 9. I don't know what I was doing wrong with previous releases but I just installed it, added my user to the correct group, and there I go.

Have you gotten Windows to work well as a guest?

I could never get it to work as well as it does with VirtualBox.

I don't know about working as well as it does in VirtualBox, but with the QXL guest driver to do screen resizing and clipboard sharing, it's not too bad.

It's been an Oracle product for 8 years, I wonder why you chose this particular release to think about searching for alternatives. Maybe you just wanted to pay tribute to John Dunsworth.

Oracle just killed Solaris and put JavaEE out to the Eclipse Foundation's hospice. They have been accelerating the purge of Sun Microsystems tech in recent months.

Doesn't Java being under an oss foundation make it safer?

JavaEE and Java are two completely different things. I don't know if too many people are shedding actual tears over JavaEE, but divesting from its management does indicate that Oracle plans to commit fewer resources to improving the standard and the reference implementations.

qemu is the best virtualization tool in my opinion.

Let’s be honest, it never was a great product, but the “price was right” compared to commercial alternatives on macOS (Aka VMware and Parallels). With the existence of virtualization natively in the OS (leveraged by xhyve and friends), there’s virtually no reason to use Virtualbox anymore for me (yes, I know that’s not the case for everyone).

The only offering I've seen close to parallels level of functionality is Veertu, which is a seemingly abandoned product since they released their CI tool Anka.

When I last tested it, Veertu wasn't reliable enough to suggest even as a $0 option.

I am a huge VMware fan and have been for a long time.

Caution: I have found mentioning this confuses people because I'm often mistaken for a FOSS zealot. I am not. I just prefer FOSS because I like to tinker. I have no moral qualms with closed source.

So, if you do decide to go VMware, you may get odd questions if you mention it. That has actually been the most difficult thing about using it. They are well supported and feature rich. I've been paying them for years.

What's the current state of GPU passthrough on VirtualBox?

Currently I dual boot between Windows (games) and Linux (everything else). I would love to just single-boot into Linux as a host and then have a Windows VM for games that need it. But that's only practical if the VM has full access to the GPU, and last I heard GPU passthrough on VirtualBox was kind of hit or miss.

You can use Qemu for that. I used to do that for a while, but found it annoying. Dual boot is much better imho, especially since it barley takes any time.

When I had issues, I had no clue if it was because of my config, the game being buggy, the nvidia drivers being buggy, etc. etc.

Also having to have "two"of everything is annoying as well.

You don't really need "two" of everything. You can have one monitor connected to two video ports, and a single mouse and keybord, a pass them through.

QEMU itself can be run via a short script, and it only requires to be run as sudo.

You shouldn't really have issues in a general sense: with the correct setup, after a short time (having exhausted the tweaking options) one will experience if the machine is compatible with VGA passthrough, or not. In the latter case, the problem is that either the guest doesn't work at all, or that it has performance problems.

The is at least one radical advantage in having a virtualized Windows: rollbacks. When I use a Windows guest, I don't care whether I'll take malware or not, since to rollback is trivial.

VirtualBox will likely not support it for a very long time (assuming they will ever do it), as VGA passthrough has some host requirements (configuration-wise), that I think would be too much to handle for a virtualization product.

I use QEMU and it works without any issue; to be specific, in hundreds of boots, it hung only a couple of times, which is very well within issues with windows itself rather than the platform. Also, it typically runs via a single script.

The crux is to have the correct hardware (some hardware just doesn't work well), and to use a correct software setup (most important thing: if you use a GPU for passthrough, forget about using it on the host at all).

The information around is unfortunately very scattered and often outdated.

I suggest to use those two sources:

  - https://github.com/saveriomiroddi/vga-passthrough
  - https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO

I wish I didn't have to choose between Docker for Windows (which requires Hyper-V enabled) and Virtualbox (which requires Hyper-V disabled afaik) on Windows 10, both are useful.

Tried it a few weeks ago to run Windows, guest os got corrupted right after installation. Searched Google and apparently this happens quite a lot. I’d say you get what you pay for, but KVM works fine. It’s just slow because there’s no graphics acceleration.

Never had any corruption ever with VirtualBox.

I have. And a whole onslaught of numerous other issues. Most of them seem to be documented in bugs 5+ years old that never get fixed.

I was once a Virtualbox fan boy. But, I'm going with KVM and Vmware moving forward.

I have, plenty of times, so glad I ditched it a few years back - the amount of performance related issues was astounding too.

Just a friendly reminder, from a former Oracle employee who was laid off recently, that Oracle is cancerous, rapacious, and DOES NOT respect you as a user or customer.

They WILL audit you. They WILL sue you. They WILL harass you. They WILL deceive you. Period. End of story. And they will make 100k easily off of you.

DON'T use Oracle products unless you are prepared to deal with these types of arbitrary, long, painful battles.

Bridged networking not working in Virtualbox 5.2 - Windows 10 x64 Host with Windows x64 Guest at least. I had to go back to 5.1.30.

Does anyone has a screenshot? I am curious to know how those "new GUI icons" look like, but don't want to install it just for see them.

Here you go:

https://imgur.com/a/uSt73

Reply on news.ycombinator.com