[Pkg-virtualbox-devel] Bug#794466: VirtualBox removal impact on Debian work

[Daniel Pocock]

I use VirtualBox on stable (currently jessie) as part of my strategy for
testing anything that will run in future Debian releases (e.g. stretch).
 It has been extremely useful for this purpose in the past.

How many other developers are working this way, either with VirtualBox
or one of the alternatives?

I recently did a trial of the stretch installer into a Virtualbox VM
(host running jessie) and ran into trouble getting the graphical
desktop, it is discussed in bug 851124[1].  Even if Virtualbox won't
continue being available, it would be helpful to other developers and
testers to find ways to make them aware of such things before they lose
any time on it.

It would also be helpful to have a summary on the wiki about some of the
points raised already in the thread:

- whether or not it will be available as a backport (I was able to run
the sid packages in my stretch VM without rebuilding or modifying them)

- a cheat sheet or conversion guide for the next best thing, whatever
that is, e.g. KVM

Given the convenience of Virtualbox, many users may not have been
tempted to explore KVM or other desktop virtualization solutions before
so it could be helpful to write a quick summary of how it really
compares to the Virtualbox package.  In particular:

- are graphics features and performance equivalent, better or worse?
I've tried setting up KVM once with the pass-through VGA and it never
worked, although that may have been a chipset limitation.  I also
recently introduced the virglrenderer[2] for qemu into Debian.  Those
are both things that Virtualbox doesn't support but they are only useful
to people with the right hardware.  For people without the right
hardware, falling back to a remote-desktop protocol might be a serious
limitation, virtio-gpu might be better but it is not clear that this
will work for a jessie host or even a stretch host just yet:
https://www.kraxel.org/blog/tag/virtio-gpu/
The fact that VirtualBox offers a strong desktop graphics solution is
probably one key reason some people may want to stay on Virtualbox, at
least until the KVM / qemu solutions work more effortlessly.

- how does CPU performance compare, e.g. speed, impact on the host?

- how convenient is it to do the basic things that most people do with
the Virtualbox GUI?  For me, those basic things are typically attaching
and detaching VDI and ISO images and tweaking the network from NAT to
bridge.

- what is the impact of migration on guest operating systems that are
sensitive to perceived hardware change, e.g. for each Windows version?

Having some of these things in one place could help people get on with
other things they are testing.

Regards,

Daniel



1. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=851124
2. https://virgil3d.github.io/