[OpenIndiana-discuss] VirtualBox

[Till Wegmüller]

Hi Tim

It is quite hard to get to Feature parity with Virtualbox when it comes
to Desktop Features. Both KVM and bHyve have traditionally been more
used in the Server and Cloud Market. However I believe some workarounds
can be made.

First Proper Graphics Integration. I have since long ago stopped using
any Virtualmachine Console for something like daily work with a GUI
(Windows) The Built in RDP Server available in almost any Windows
Version is massively Powerfull and the FOSS Implementation xfreerdp
works well for many Use cases. Including Clipbord sharing any much more.
Using the Virtual Machines Remote Desktop Capability is what you want in
most cases.

RedHat tried to offer a competing Product to Microsofts RDP with Spice
but did not succeed that much. And as is unfortunately common with
RedHat Software it makes heavy use of Linux exclusive functionality.

Both bHyve and QEMU use VNC as default. TigerVNC which we have packaged
should allow for Good resolution and Clipboard Sharing. You may need the
Virtio Windows Dirvers and the Quemu Guest Agent though. I would guess
since Virtualbox also uses software on the Guest for this purpose.

bHyve looks like to be a step Back when it comes to Desktop features.

As for Resolution. This depends very much on the Graphics device Qemu
presents to the VM. We seem to have cirrus, qxl, vmware and std
available. I believe std is vesa. At least qxl, cirrus and vmware should
be able to support 1080p Dsktop resolutions. You will need to pass the
correct -vga option when starting the VM.

As for shared Folders. The situation seems a lot better here for both
KVM and bHyve. Both Support virtio-9p aka VirtFS. Which has kernel
drivers for at least Linux which can use the Filesystem as Root
apparently. Unfortunatly Windows Driver Work is not yet that complete
see [0]. But with some Poking of both the ReactOS and the virtio-win
Community this will be the way to go for shared folders. What remains as
a question is if we have virtio-9p support compiled with our version of
Qemu as it is quite recent. See [1] for examples of usage.

While finishing this mail I noticed the Features list on freerdp [2]. It
has everything you wanted. Given the feature compiles in Illumos. I
think the Quickest way to get to feature parity is using Windows RDP
server and Freedrp.

[0] https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows/issues/126
[1] https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP/wiki/CommandLineInterface
[2] https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP/wiki/CommandLineInterface

Researching Greetings
Till
On 11/14/18 07:37 PM, Tim Mooney wrote:
> In regard to: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] VirtualBox, Stephan Althaus
> said...:
> 
>> If you are on OmniOs / Omniosce, you have Bhyve.
>> You can use that instead of virtualbox.
>>
>> With Openindiana, you could use QEMU-KVM as well..
>> What are your personal reasons not to do so?
> 
> There was a thread a couple weeks ago where some people, myself included,
> posted some of the reasons why they had previously found VirtualBox
> preferrable to KVM.  The "feature parity" part of the thread kind of
> starts with my post:
> 
>     https://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana-discuss/2018-October/022445.html
> 
> 
> Tim