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/
