The content of the article which does not work for most of HN.<p><pre><code> Enter your search termsSubmit search formWeblkml.org
Date Thu, 6 Oct 2011 15:05:27 -0400
From Dave Jones <>
Subject RFC: virtualbox tainting.
The number of bug reports we get from people with virtualbox loaded are
truly astonishing. It's GPL, but sadly that doesn't mean it's good.
Nearly all of these bugs look like random corruption. (corrupt linked lists,
corrupt page tables, and just plain 'weird' crashes).
This diff adds tainting to the module loader to treat it as we do with stuff
from staging/ (crap). With this tainting in place, automatic bug filing tools
can opt out of automatically filing kernel bugs, and inform the user to file
bugs somewhere more appropriate.
Signed-off-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
diff --git a/kernel/module.c b/kernel/module.c
index 04379f92..d26c9a3 100644
--- a/kernel/module.c
+++ b/kernel/module.c
@@ -2653,6 +2653,10 @@ static int check_module_license_and_versions(struct module *mod)
if (strcmp(mod->name, "ndiswrapper") == 0)
add_taint(TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE);
+ /* vbox is garbage. */
+ if (strcmp(mod->name, "vboxdrv") == 0)
+ add_taint(TAINT_CRAP);
+
/* driverloader was caught wrongly pretending to be under GPL */
if (strcmp(mod->name, "driverloader") == 0)
add_taint_module(mod, TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE);</code></pre>
Virtualbox works fine for me. Though I only use it to run Windows XP so I'm probably not a demanding customer, but calling it garbage is kind of over-the top. It's very useful for me for running some windows-only software that refuses to work in Wine, and to test my sw on windows without having to reboot...
I recently switched from VMWare to Virtualbox because i was sick of finding patches for VMWare kernel modules everytime there is a new kernel version out.
I had some major bugs on VMWare too, usually. Either some keys stopped working (in the host system!) or the VM crashed completely..
I used Virtualbox only for a few hours but it didn't have any hickups so far.<p>Unfortunately i can't read the article either..
Potentially easier link to read, in terms of the threading:<p><a href="http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1200194" rel="nofollow">http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1200194</a>
There are many voices in defense of VirtualBox in this thread already, but I will still add mine, because VirtualBox has been a great tool for me and I feel it deserves to be defended. For the last three years I use Virtualbox to run Windows and Linux VMs on a Linux host. Other than a handful of weird hickups of Windows XP guests, which can probably be attributed to the guest OS, I did not run into any major problems in what must be thousands of hours of guest and hypervisor uptime.<p>VMware Workstation, OTOH, crashed my host(!) system hard several times, which actually drove me to Virtualbox in the first place. Granted, that was three years ago, but I did not have any reason to give VMware Workstation another try, as Virtualbox works very well for me.
The link in the parent is https, try this regular http link if you can't read the article:<p><a href="http://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317" rel="nofollow">http://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317</a>
Although I am a heavy VirtualBox-user (vagrant is just too good), I can relate to this.<p>The only reason why my machine ever panicks is exactly the one cited in this mail: vboxdrv.
Google Cache: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WThcCZIZus0J:lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317+site:lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317&hl=en&strip=1" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WThcCZI...</a>
I have used VirtualBox on a linux host with WinXP as the client operating system for about three years, every day. I depend on it for work and have found it to be rock-solid and completely dependable. I really appreciate the contributors to the project. They deserve some love!
I've had quite a few issues with it.<p>1. Copy + paste randomly breaks between host win32, client ubuntu32.<p>2. Random freezes every so often.<p>3. Seamless mode extremely unreliable, does not draw correctly.<p>4. Horrible issues with shared folders breaking io operations. I actually got a (trivial) patch into golang to work around this issue (!). This also completely breaks ido mode completions in emacs.<p>5. Occasionally shared folders get into an odd state and no files can be read from/written to them.<p>4 + 5 might be specific to the way I use shared folders though, as I access them via a dropbox folder sat in a truecrypt volume.
Yeah, VirtualBox crashes for me all the time. Does it have automatic error reporting to Oracle on why it is unstable? I would hope that these crashes are fixable.
one particular aspect of VirtualBox has pissed me off in recent days. the system-level debugger is complete trash; it totally fails to do even simple things like inserting working breakpoints. at one point I had to resort to dropping int 3s into my code wherever I thought I might eventually want a breakpoint, and even that doesn't work most of the time.<p>so I gave up on VirtualBox and switched to QEMU, which works significantly better.
I run my startup on a MBP with multiple VMs. It's been a love/hate affair with VirtualBox, but so far I manage to live with the shortcomings. Can't argue with free. Tried Parallel early on when truly frustrated, but found it doesn't add much over VBox to justify the price. Here are a few tips that I live by:<p>1. Obviously, never put critical data on a VM not matter how stable it seems. Definitely have Dropbox installed.<p>2. Make it a good habit to pause the VM before you pack up and go or switch to a different network. When turning it back on, disconnect the network interface then reconnect.<p>3. When the UI freezes, you can rescue on a Mac with AppleKey+F6 (or a few other Func keys) to another tty console. Login there and reboot. After you get the VM back, VBox likes it when you do a proper reboot before you resume working.<p>4. Take snapshot regularly, definitely right after you just checkin a major chunk of code!
Not Garbage. Default configuration is not optimal, however.<p>I use it all the time on Windows XP to run Ubuntu.<p>Initially, I did have a few problems because I didn't have Ubuntu or Virtualbox configured correctly. Also, I wasn't using 'VBOXADDITIONS,' which actually are extremely useful and important.<p>Some quick googling fixed my problems, in any case and I don't have any problems with it anymore.
Wonder if there's a selection bias here; VirtualBox may be less stable than native hardware or commercial VMs, but it's user base is also using VirtualBox for different scenarios than native users.<p>I know I use VirtualBox all the time to try out "risky" behaviors that often end in a crash, because I know I can just roll back if it doesn't work out.
VirtualBox running on a Windows 7 host with a Linux guest works great and improves each major release.<p>That being said, I've had severe issues with networking on older releases. Often the interface would work on the guest right after install, but would then completely fail the next time the VM was powered on.<p>It seems that has largely been fixed though.
VirtualBox has always worked very well for me. Perhaps the poster did not install it correctly or just doesn't know what they are doing?<p>Just not me: I know about a half dozen people who also use VirtualBox, and I haven'heard complaints. Perhaps the poster works for one of the commercial competitors.<p>Strange rant against a good, and free tool.
I can't read the article at the moment as it seems the server has died but I can say that in my use of VirtualBox on OS X in the last 2 years I have yet to have a major crash. The majority of the time it has been used for very temporary staging environments in Debian and it's been perfect for this.
VirtualBox runs XP and Win7 perfectly on my MBP2011; it has saved my skin a number of times and am not sure why it does not work for some people. I was considering getting Parallels but this seems to do the trick and works for 2 other people I know as well. Plus it's free....
I agree that VirtualBox has problems.I was running Ubuntu on Mac OS X using VirtualBox because it was free, however it kept crashing constantly and didn't shut down properly.<p>I bought Parallels instead, and I am happy so far
The project has some other notable issues that can be quite frustrating. Primary among them the performance of the shared folder file system with complex file structures (the reason why Vagrant uses NFS).
I've been using VirtualBox for the last 15 months on a daily basis. I've used it on Windows XP, Windows 7, Ubuntu and recently on Mac hosts with Windows XP, Windows 7, and Ubuntu guests. I've never ran into any problems with it. The only thing that doesn't work properly is 3D Acceleration which I think has something to do with my system's graphics card probably.<p>Two of my friends however lost their guest machines (Windows and Ubuntu) on the Mac version. Hope it doesn't happen on my Mac.<p>In my opinion, VirtualBox is an amazing piece of software, and calling it "garbage" is harsh and unprofessional.
i guess not much has changed in their code in 3 years:<p><a href="http://old.nabble.com/Bug-reports-regarding-Innotek-VirtualBox-td15907184.html" rel="nofollow">http://old.nabble.com/Bug-reports-regarding-Innotek-VirtualB...</a>
I've tried vbox when I used a mac and couldn't get past the user interface. The gui severely limits what I can easily do with it, and it's just plain irritating sometimes.<p>Now I'm back on linux and kvm/qemu, and I'm much happier. Why are people using vbox over kvm?
although i love VBox, i confess i've had serious issues with it on OSX running the Win8 Dev Preview.<p>(the amount of times i've now seen the apple lightbox of death is pretty ridic)
Apart from VirtualBox being notably slower (and less complete in working D3D/OpenGL support) than f.e. Parallels Desktop, I can't say I've had any gripes or stability issues with it, barring a recent, short-lived bug that caused VBox to automatically power down an active VM as soon as it went idle. I've been using VBox on OS X for a bit over 2 years now, for development purposes related to Windows XP, OpenBSD, one or two Linux distributions, and even Haiku.