[OpenIndiana-discuss] Virtualbox on OpenIndiana

[Bayard Bell]

There are three problems running on VBox I've seen previously: 1) building illumos-gate from source takes days instead of hours; 2) the debug kernel is extremely unstable, frequently locking up and unable to recover; and 3) scalability for vCPU and memory is flat on the reference host platform (Ubuntu) and actually degrades materially going from 2 vCPUs and 4 GB memory to 4 vCPUs and 8 GB memory with an OS X host.

I worked directly with the VBox developers on benchmarks a year ago to document some of these issues. There are definite gaps in what was tested, as well as assumptions that I was told were reasonable that I'd want to evaluate more critically this time out. The VBox devs are very reasonable, at least once you establish that you come bringing quality bug reports and strong supporting data, and they seems pretty dedicated to understanding and resolving problems with their product.

I'm pretty heavily committed at this point, so this isn't a problem I can chase. I have, however, elsewhere recently offered to help other illumos developers who want to see this resolved.

Cheers,
Bayard

On Mar 19, 2012, at 5:34 AM, Geoff Nordli <geoffn at gnaa.net> wrote:

> I have been using vbox 4.1.x on OI 151 for about 5 months now running
> some server-based VMs with good success.
> 
> I noticed some comments from Bayard on the list about how vbox was
> completely unusable for development.
> 
> Are there other people having success using it on servers or have I
> just been lucky?
> 
> thanks,
> 
> Geoff
> 
> _______________________________________________
> OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
> OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss