VirtualBox 7.0 Released – Full VM Encryption Support, New Direct3D Acceleration (opens in new tab)

They just went ahead and sent us an invoice. Sales by extortion... so I made sure to replace our JRE in places (where Oracle snuck in) and uninstall anything else Oracle across our fleet.

Oh yeah when I worked at Oracle they'd do these kinds of shakedowns even on stuff people were paying to host. This was pre OCI though, dunno if they're still doing it. Felt like something the mob would do.

Nice company you have there, shame if something were unlicensed eh?

It's a shame that Oracle make their products toxic because this particular one is truly fantastic.

I was happy to pay the USD30 they charged back then, but they wanted a minimum order of 100 units!

Something similar happened to me, but with Qt. I installed Qt Open Source at home to compile OpenMSX debugger (a hobby project to which I have contributed). I don't know why I used my work email account instead of my personal one. The next day at work, we received a call from Qt with threats saying that we had to buy a licence.

> The incredible legal/licensing team got in touch because they identified this use.

If you know how many companies have this tech for license enforcement, you'd be more than amazed. Seriously.

What's the issue? As far as I know the extension pack is a commercial piece of software and you have to pay to use it for work.

The kind of projects I work on, that is a rounding error on overall project budget.

VS Ultimate, SQL Server, AEM, Sitecore, SharePoint, Azure, AWS,...

How much do the licences cost?

The only way I've been able to get good virtualized 2D performance without providing a GPU directly to the VM has been to use a display manager where you can disable compositing. Otherwise, you end up having to use a software 3D rasterizer like LLVMpipe, which can be quite slow.

The native display managers for XFCE, MATE, and (I believe) KDE allow you to disable compositing. GNOME and Unity's native display managers don't (AFAIK). I have no idea if display compositing can be disabled on macOS.

I use 4K screens. Virtualbox is literally unusable at those resolutions. I have to run VMs at 1080p and upscale them in Virtualbox. At 4k, simple actions such as opening the start menu take several seconds.

VMWare does this much better, but is a pain to run on up-to-date kernels.

The situation sucks, is what I'm saying.

I don't know how the perf is, but this might be of interest: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

(Note: This is for the next major release of Mac OS.)

I discovered a few days ago that VMware now offer a 'Fusion 12 Player', which is free (as in beer) albeit you have to register to get the download + key. Might be worth looking into that?

I had an issue thinking UI was slow, but it turned up that mouse pointer integration issue - simple check: get a USB mouse and inject that USB device into VM.

Still not as good (as I remember VMware would provide), but better!

BTW, tested 7.0 just now -- anecdotally Ubuntu's UI does not feel any faster and somehow still depends on the resolution not the size of the window being moved

It might have been because the guest was trying to do 3D compositing without acceleration. 3D acceleration was in really bad shape in VirtualBox 6, being completely unusable on nVidia cards and buggy elsewhere. The release notes say they finally fixed it so I'm excited to give it another shot.

If you want great video performance you are doing it wrong. You can watch videos probably but I've never gotten good sound performance out of it. Most of my development is backend and web and it's fine for that. You absolutely have to not skimp on ram, cores, and need at least an SSD. I find it acceptable for what I do (rust windows programming) when I give it enough cpus on the 8 core system. Sure it's not straightup native but it's okay. You have obviously install all the guest additions (open source ones) to get about the best you're going to expect.

GUI performance was never great, but neither was it that bad either. Certainly nothing like you've described. This is with Windows and Linux hosts, running Linux or BSD guests

Use VNC/RDP to connect to the guest.

GPU passthrough or weep. This is why VMs are so rare on consumer devices.

You could have a VM where you do your secret stuff, and then shut it down when you are done and nobody can access it without the key.

It doesn't help against sophisticated keyloggers on the host (although I'd assume you would have a little bit of protection if you don't normally work as admin). It is more for the case that your PC gets stolen, or confiscated by authorities.

I think my PCs which shipped with full disc encryption are secure (Windows, macOS), but I never looked into it in detail. And I don't know for sure who could access it besides me (my job, Microsoft/Apple, law enforcement). My old shared desktop PC is definitely not encrypted. I only really have confidence in the Linux laptop I set up.

So for me it would be a privacy and comfort win to just have a small VM for sensitive stuff which is easy to encrypt.

I used to encrypt ubuntu or home directory, these days I just use virtualbox's vm encryption, worked well so far.

virtualbox over the years is very helpful to me and I'm grateful for it. The only problem I had is that it can not handle high throughput under stress(e.g. build full Android release leads to filesystem corruption), for 99% of the time it is very usable.

Virtualbox VM encryption can be useful if the host hypervisor is compromised and the unauthorized party uploads data on disk that the host can trivially access (as is frequently the case with ransomware).

It is so you don't have to trust sysops, theoretically. The system admin won't be able to view the contents of the VM. Hyper-V supports this as well.

It is a nice extra layer of protection and the encrypted VMs can be moved to another computer or backed up without losing the encryption

Don’t use it. Period.

ORACLE is just releasing this to dupe people into thinking they can use this for free (they can’t).

Is there a documented case of Oracle suing somebody for using VirtualBox on a company network? They have no way of knowing if it is some private person on a guest WiFi or if it is used in production. I know Oracle is famously litigious, but I've only heard about this in cases of CAD software.

I'm all for being professional and paying for your tools, but it seems VirtualBox is in the class of "haha I'm not paying for that" like TeamViewer and WinRAR.

i use pihole rules :/

It cannot possibly be for technical reasons.

It's almost certainly something to do with this:

https://www.vectis.com/media/vectis-ip-announces-call-for-pa...

Which is complete bullsh*t.

Looks like Fraunhoffer and Dolby intend to go after any commercial product using Opus, and demand fees. They claim this is only for hardware devices … for now. As to software, they only state they do not intend to go after open source software. But since Virtualbox is also commercial software, Oracle is at risk.

Searching a GitHub mirror reveals https://github.com/mdaniel/virtualbox-org-svn-vbox-trunk/com...

No idea what bugref:10275 is. It's presumably not https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/10275

VirtualBox itself is GPL3 licensed. However the Addon for fast USB etc. which is an extra download is proprietary. To my understanding Sun tried to open source that as well, but it contained third party code they couldn't open up.

In this release the EHCI and XHCI USB controllers have moved from the addon to the opensource base.

Sounds strange I know but without doubt what works best for me is freexrdp. It's good enough to feel native if you do not use 3d acceleration or heavy 2d acceleration. Even videoplayback is okay.

On OSX then just use any RDP client to your liking to connect to the vm/container.

UTM is really good. It’s basically just a nice GUI around QEMU. But their bundled version of QEMU also includes a patch to get SPICE working, the homebrew and Macports versions don’t have SPICE working so clipboard access and auto display resizing doesn’t work. Or at least I couldn’t get them to work.

The Ubuntu ARM image from their “gallery” works perfectly out of the box so is a good starting point.

Betatesting in a legal minefield, now there's a challenge!

I'm not that technical and not sure what you mean by tainted kernel.

You can use VirtualBox with Secure Boot on a Dell XPS 9300 running Ubuntu. When you boot it up after installing, it prompts you to install the keys.

What’s wrong with qemu/kvm?

What do people use who run an M1/M2 based Mac but want to run an x86 VM?

Because you can't do this with Virtualbox.

That's caught my attention

I was a big user of dual boot and VFIO, but thanks to the advent of Proton and the recent Wine improvements (DXVK, ...) I've found myself rebooting into Windows for gaming less and less over the course of the last few years. Sure, not everything works, but basically everything single player does with just a few hiccups.

VMWare has actually a decent "forward-based" GPU virtualization support. The performance is bad (on my system, around 25% of native), but for old games, it's enough. I'm hoping that VirtualBox 7.0 will have similar performance (and support; it had 3d virtualization already, but it was very poor).

People were already playing GTA 5 at least five years ago using VFIO/PCIe Passthrough.

EDIT: Correction, it was four years ago from my few seconds of rechecking myself

VirtualBox is cross-platform; runs on Linux, Mac, Windows. Images are portable. As a sibling notes, the Windows built-in is Hyper-V. Or if you don’t like your money, VMWare.

Hyper-V?