VirtualBox 7.2 fixes flaky 3D guests and adds Arm-on-Arm support VirtualBox 7.2 is here, bringing improved Arm-on-Arm virtualization features and better 3D acceleration support. The major update came out last week, and The Reg FOSS desk has been putting it through its paces. This version has some worthwhile improvements in its 3D handling, which we're already finding useful, and some others …
> Cheers for the clarification on the extensions thing.
You're welcome. I put in a mention more or less every time I write about Virtualbox but I still get told off in the comments by people who didn't RTFA, and I know most people don't read everything I write and then remember it all.
VBox is free. Avoid the extensions pack and it's 100% safe to use in production and they can't touch you for it.
>> until I find a decent alternative
So get off your arse and go and find something as good and as free. Put your non-money where your mouth is.
People like you are the people who bite the hand that feeds you. Nobody forced you to use VirtualBox, nobody is forcing you now. But there you are, boohooing about big bad Oracle as they provide this to you for free.
Freeloaders freeload.
Oracle gave me steak and chips for nothing. But they didn't give me any Bearnaise sauce.
Greedy Oracle. They're just leading me astray, giving me free steak and chips for years until I get so used to it that I will not be able to control my taste buds, and only buy expensive Oracle steak and chips in the future.
The skill set for VirtualBox is minimal. It's actually user-friendly. That's Free Loader 101.
The Bearnaise sauce is called the VirtualBox Extension Pack. It looks like another dish on the free all-you-can-eat buffet but if you accidently try it your employer will be charged for you and at least 99 employees more even if the company is smaller than 100 employees. If your company has more than 100 employees then all employees will be charged for.
The cost of the Bearnaise sauce per employee is £39.94 + £8.79 first year support and upgrade + £undisclosed later years support and upgrade + whatever extra cost Oracle deems it necessary on top to have been brought into compliance (i.e. the cost of detecting the download and sending menacing emails to the right person in your company).
>> if you accidently
Fred accidentally does not read the notice and he accidentally does not read he licence and accidentally does not read the FAQ, and he accidentally clicks the accept and download button, and accidentally goes through the setup program. I have no idea what it looks like for the extensions, but I guess there is another screen showing the licence. Fred accidentally doesn't read that either.
Does Fred accidentally forget to pay for his bus ticket or his shopping? In court: I accidentally got on the bus and accidentally did not not see the notice about paying the fare and so I accidentally did not pay.
Perhaps Fred accidentally did not change the default passwords on key systems as he was setting them up. And due to Fred's accident, the company he works for suffers a catastrophic hack. It is later reported here on The Reg, and we can all accidentally laugh.
Of course you're trolling to make what you think is a point.
The Extension Pack didn't exist until VBox 4 - Oracle's version. They put USB support in the Extension Pack and gave it a different licence to trip people up. In a corporation of several thousand people, someone's going to screw up or think the licence doesn't apply to them or use personal stuff on a work device. In a small company, someone's going to connect their BYOD laptop to the work VPN and VBox will ping Oracle.
I can only assume they moved the USB code from the Extension Pack to VBox 7.0 because too many employers were telling employees not to use VBox - even without the Extension Pack. Such is Oracle's licencing that nobody wants to be on Oracle's radar.
Don't try and argue that the hard work was done by Oracle - all Oracle did was buy the previous owners and work out a licence and distribution method to screw people over.
And in this article we see that 3D was fixed in 7.2 but 7.1 is the last Catalina version. What's stopping them backporting the 3D fix to the 7.1 branch?
There are better VMs around, but VirtualBox is easier for the beginner to pick up due to the GUI. That's all it's got going for it.
> The Extension Pack didn't exist until VBox 4
IMHO you are obscuring the real story here, in an unhelpful way that borders disinformation.
When it went freeware, until the end of v3, there were 2 versions: VBox open source edition (OSE) and VBox try-before-you-buy under the PEUL edition.
This caused FUD that it wasn't free.
Then Oracle moved all the paid-for bits into the extension pack and the base edition is since then 100% FOSS and free for all. You choose to install the proprietary bits... and progressively over time functionality is moved from the EP into the base edition.
So (IIRC) in VBox 5 the EP was needed for USB 2 in guests.
From about Vbox 6, the free base product supported USB 2, and the EP was needed for USB 3.
Now, in 7.2, the free base edition supports NVMe and that no longer needs the EP.
The PEUL licence used to allow 30-days trial in a commercial settng for years, then a change was made to it and it didn't any more. What's the point of calling it an evaluation licence if you're allowed to use it personally anyway but not allowed to evaluate it commercially?
It's hardly FUD that it's not free because so many people can get caught up in a situation where their company gets audited by Oracle. All of this confusion could have been avoided by building two editions - community and commercial, like almost everyone else does and the way it was done before Oracle. That way it's clear if a bill is going to land on your company's doormat or not because someone in your company downloaded the EP and Oracle have their IP on record.
They do this with VBox and they do this with Java, also supposedly FOSS. Oracle love confusion when it comes to licences and the solution is simply don't go anywhere near Oracle.
BTW, I had a USB3 host PC and couldn't get away with plain VBox using just USB2, it crashed and I had to install the extensions pack.
But on 6.X XP programs using Direct-Something, for no good reason (Scrabble) worked and on 7.x they don't. No 3D Acc on XP in Guest Additions, though you can enable it in settings.
Apparently the older system was a mess, and there is now no 7.x support. But it seems impossible to go back to 6.x on Linux Mint.
> No 3D Acc on XP in Guest Additions, though you can enable it in settings.
I do not have an XP VM around any more, but as I recall, you needed to go through a special installation sequence:
1. Disable 3D acceleration (IIRC)
2. Boot XP in Safe Mode
3. In Safe Mode, install the Guest Additions.
4. Exit Safe Mode
5. Check the GAs are working
6. Re-enable 3D acceleration.
When using 3D in a guest, give it lots of VRAM. 128MB is the recommended _minimum_. 7.2 now allows 256MB guest VRAM.
> I highlighted that Base is not very good
Yes, as if this were some critical weakness.
I have never needed it and never used it. It used to need Java at one point and at some point it bundled a freebie copy of Adabas Natural or something.
You are perpetuating a BS campaign started by MS:
Most people don't want or need Access, so what we'll do is, we'll bundle it, but we will call that version of Office "Professional" so everyone thinks they are pros and need the Pro edition.
They don't. I have installed hundreds of licenses of Office Pro. I'd say 90% of them never even ran Access except by mistake. But they bought it because they thought they needed Pro.
So, LO bundles a DB that most people don't need because they've been lied to that they need Pro and Pro means a DB.
It may be crap. Wouldn't know. Never needed it, never tried it. Nor have 90% of the users.
This is not a good criterion for evaluating the whole, or for judging the whole as flawed because a part few need, want or use is inferior in your assessment.
>> I have never needed it and never used it.
But what about those people who do want a usable database?
>> Most people don't want or need Access
Access has about an 8% market share according to several sources. 8% is a lot of people.
>> I'd say 90% of them never even ran Access except by mistake
So the other 10% wanted a database? That's a lot of people...
I didn't crap on the whole of LO, just the bits which are not so good. Base is not so good. I know this because I spent many hours trying to make it do simple things. Document exchange with Word and Excel has also been weak at times. Again, this is from experience.
> virt-manager excels at transparently managing remote hypervisors over the network
FWIW, incus is very good at that too - for both containers and VMs.
The incus daemon needs to run on Linux, or in a Linux VM on other platforms (e.g. see colima), but the client is native across multiple platforms. You just add your Linux incus servers as "remotes". And if you like, running "incus webui" gives you a web interface, via a secure tunnel.
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I tried VMWare Workstation on Windows and it was the most unstable pile of poop I've used, it was like using a hypervisor from about 15 years ago. Constant guest reboots ( Ubuntu and Rocky ) almost every 5-10 mins drove me nuts, then when they started up they'd report errors so you'd have to hard reset the VMs. I stuck with it for about a week and it was horrendous. Shame really as I seem to recall VMW was one of the best about 10 years ago, it's no real surprise they're giving it away now I guess. I'm now using MS Hyper-V trying to avoid VBox, H-V is not as feature rich as others but it's free and seems to do the job and can at least keep a VM up and running.
A little surprising given virtualbox seems to be GPL3 that nobody has come up with a gpl extension pack by now? Guess nobody cares enough. I've been VMware exclusive at home since 1999. I do regularly leverage usb passthrough to pass a usb headset to a windows ltsc 1809 VM from my Linux host for things like zoom, teams etc. i could probably do it from the linux host I just try to isolate a bunch of work stuff to the VM.
Also have found it useful sometimes to pass usb flash drives or disks directly to a VM. I remember I setup my terramaster NAS with Devuan linux by passing a USB SSD to a VM, installing on that and configuring it. Then disconnect and plug it into the NAS(after disconnecting the internal usb drive with their crap OS which when I got it I managed to get file corruption in btrfs in under an hour this was maybe 2019), and booting from that no trickery or anything fancy required was quite surprised how easy it was. Rock solid too. 24x7 for over 5 years now.
I've always been too paranoid about host stability to use hardware 3d acceleration in a VM. I expect to go at least 3 to 4 months between reboots on the host. Same reason I don't play games on my primary linux system. Not when I have 50 different apps and terminals running across 24 different virtual desktops. I have other computers I use for gaming where I don't care about rebooting.(Most of the time they are off as I don't game often)
Thanks for the report. I gave VirtualBox a run over the summer. I normally use Parallels but have so far dodged the shift to annual subscriptions. It took a while but I managed to convert the Parallels image to something VirtualBox could use. The rest was fairly straightforward, except for setting up full screen. I can confirm the crashes when trying to use hardware acceleration and overall it felt sluggish and unresponsive – much worse than Parallels which I've been using for over a decade for Windows VMs on Macintosh. Given this, I'll be sticking with Parallels but nice to VirtualBox still getting some work – we need a competitive marketplace for good products.
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