Let me add one more voice to say, why oh why would you do that to yourself and suffer subpar virtualization when you have world class type 1 virtualization built straight into the kernel. And an incredibly capable UI, around since 2009, in the form of virt-manager?
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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and suffer subpar virtualization
Meh I can get a Win11 guest that interacts well and conveniently with the host and its peripherals and if all I'm doing is running tax software, office365 or compile my Rust app to test it cross platform - vbox is perfectly fine. I'm not running anything demanding.
I'm not taking a stance against KVM it's great, but rather saying that for some of us it's not that big of an issue which solution to use, it just needs to be convenient.
But like... why? It's not even more convenient, virt-manager is literally zero setup (in Debian at least) and you don't need to deal with DKMS.
The kvm-guest-agent tool and some virtio drivers even exist for winblows.
When I run virt-manager on Bookworm, all it does is tell me that "xen is not connected". There is nothing to indicate that KVM is anything that virt-manager might support, or why it currently doesn't.
The best I can do is to make a VM in gnome boxes, use "ps" to capture its command line to qemu, re-format that into something that I can put into a bash script, and edit in additional options that Boxes/libvirt absolutely refuse to support.
Most of the host integration features are better in Virtualbox. On the other hand, with qemu I don't have to look at VB filling the journal with ubsan errors (and wonder if its crappy driver is corrupting shit). If VB supported KVM, I would go right back to it.
You just need to add a KVM connection.
File > Add connection > select "QEMU/KVM" > Profit
Most of the host integration features are better in Virtualbox.
Highly doubt that, specially if you're using Virtio devices and the qemu guest agents.
Aha, thank you! That's just a weird enough concept to "attach to" a local QEMU user session (where virt-manager will be the guy spinning it off anyway) that I would never have seen it.
Every newbie article about virt-manager starts with a filled list of connections, so I was down to figuring that it's cleverly detecting a missing dependency or permission and silently eliminating list entries for me.
Glad it helped! The idea is that virt-manager is semi backend agnostic. It'll doe Xen, Qemu, and LXC via libvirt, and it can do those as root, or unprivileged as well as connect to remote sessions via ssh. Pretty darn cool!
Don't you hate it when a newbie how-to doesn't start from where a newbie will, with a fresh install and nothing configured and no prior knowledge?
Tried for days to get a windows 11 guest to work on KVM with virt manager. Couldn't get very good performance at all. Virtual box with guest drivers is pretty close to bare metal for me. I'd love to use KVM but can't get good performance
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Cool beans. KVM is one step away from fully replacing VirtualBox and VMware for desktop virtualisation - getting a Windows 3D driver for Virtio. For use cases that can get away without it, it's already there.
AFAIK it's being worked on but time is a major issue for the person handling the MR.
I'd love to donate specifically to get Virtio/VirGL on a Windows guest. Given that VirtualBox and VMware could be on very shaky ground thanks to their owners, I think libvirt will be the long-term solution.
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What happened to being able to use VirtualBox as a front-end to KVM? That seemed like the best of both worlds.
It's still being maintained. It's a third-party project btw, but it's just a patchset so you'll need to build it yourself: https://github.com/cyberus-technology/virtualbox-kvm
Arch users can also install the virtualbox-kvm package from AUR to get it all in one go, nice and easy.
Why would you do that when libvirt exists and is GTK themed?
Libvirt is the backend for virtualization. Maybe you meant virtual manager? In that case it is Qt based.
Virtual box is slow and buggy and it probably will always be that way. It is simply the nature of its design.
Odd, since in my experience, it's the most consistently reliable, performant, and easy to setup / use desktop vm package I've used. It always seems to "just work" when others don't
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Why does a virtual machine platform need to add support for different kernel versions? What changes are there in the kernel that affects how it interacts with the virtual hardware?
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