[OpenIndiana-discuss] Upgraded to VirtualBox 5.2.20

[Tim Mooney]

In regard to: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Upgraded to VirtualBox 5.2.20,...:

> Hi,
>
> On 10/22/18 07:35 PM, russell wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Upgraded to VirtualBox 5.2.20 yesterday, this works fine on the BE completed 
>> on the 11th July but still get the lockup and reboot on any later BE.
>
> I know it bothers some of you guys, that VirtualBox does not work on 
> OpenIndiana anymore, but please take into account that VirtualBox is
> meant for Oracle Solaris 11 and when it worked on illumos it was just by
> an accident.  The more illumos diverges from Solaris heritage (and
> mitigating Intel bugs in "helped" here a lot), the worst for VirtualBox
> on illumos.
>
> Those who can, please, don't hold your breath and consider migrating to 
> illumos KVM. This is in many respects saner, safer, and more supportable 
> solution moving forward.

I know you're right, Michael.  I'm one of the VB users that's been
dragging my feet and hoping that a fix happens so that I can continue to
use VB.  It's not because I'm in love with VirtualBox, just that I
absolutely need a fully-functional Windows VM.

The only reason I can use OI as my $work desktop is that between OI and
my Windows VM in VirtualBox, I can get all my work done.  VB made it
easy to have a Windows VM with a shared folder, USB passthrough, full
audio support, etc.  If that ever changes, and it's no longer possible for
me to host a fully-functional Windows VM on OI, then I'll probably have to
quit using OI at work.

I haven't tried KVM/QEMU for a Windows VM yet, but I have been watching
the discussion closely.  The information that Predrag has shared and added
to the wiki article makes it appear that KVM still has a ways to go before
there would be feature parity for a Windows desktop VM.  Would you say 
my interpretation is correct, or have I come to the wrong conclusion?

Based on the wiki article, it appears that at least

1) shared clipboard doesn't work.  I believe it was Alp that indicated
that's because of missing libspice in OI.

Has anyone ported or started working on porting libspice to OI?  I took
a look at that last night, and got past the struct socket issues (requires
-D__XOPEN_SOURCE=600) and the missing SUN_LEN macro (needs code from
sys/un.h), but I stopped when I hit the need for mremap().  Not sure what
to do about that.

2) video display support maxed at 1024x768 in Predrag's tests.

Any idea why that is, or how difficult that would be to improve?

3) what other things are missing to bring KVM/QEMU to good feature parity,
at least for Windows VMs, with VB?  Anyone looked at USB passthrough?
How's audio support?  Does a working libspice get us both shared clipboard
and shared folders?

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                                             Tim.Mooney at ndsu.edu
Enterprise Computing & Infrastructure                  701-231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J6, Quentin Burdick Building                  701-231-8541 (Fax)
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