[OpenIndiana-discuss] Upgraded to VirtualBox 5.2.20

[Carl Brewer]

On 24/10/2018 5:10 AM, Tim Mooney wrote:
> 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.

I'm in the same boat.  I've been running OI (well, OpenSolaris) since it 
was first released, as a ZFS LAN fileserver and VirtualBox host, with a 
gaggle of little VM's (Older NetBSD's, some newer CentOS) for over 10 
years, it's been mostly faultless and *easy* - VirtualBox's GUI is 
great, it makes VM's trivial to install and manage for a guy like me who 
just wants to spin up some VM's with minimal effort and have them Just 
Work for most-any guest OS.

The idea of having to learn yet another VM system .. gak .. that may or 
may not support my older NetBSD VMs etc .. and doesn't appear to have a 
nice GUI to drive it.

But then, I need to replace my hardware as it's getting old, so I need 
to install a newer openIndiana, which doesn't seem to work (yet) on 
recent Coffee-Lake Gigabyte motherboards.  At least I haven't yet been 
able to get it to install.  Sorry for the whiny rant :)

I want ZFS, it's *the* filesystem.  I want VirtualBox or something else 
that works as well as it does in terms of ease of use - performance is 
acceptable, I'm not thrashing filesystems etc.  Maybe Solaris 11.4 is a 
viable host?  I dunno, after 30 years in this game in some form or 
another, I'm tired of having to change things all the time to do the 
same job!