On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 23:37, Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jun 09, 2011 at 02:00:57PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
 > On Thu, Jun 09, 2011 at 08:01:06PM +1000, Chris Jones wrote:
 >
 > > I agree. As virtualization technology becomes more and more involved
 > > and frequent on users systems, particularly with advanced Linux users,
 > > I think there needs to be a strong focus on ensuring that all releases
 > > run in virtualized environments without any major issues. ie.
 > > Virtualbox.
 > >
 > > Perhaps a dedicated team among the developers who specialize in this area.
 >
 > I don't think there are any developers working on this area, where "this
 > area" is Virtualbox. We don't ship Virtualbox. We don't ship a kernel
 > that has any knowledge of Virtualbox. There's a good argument for having
 > this be part of the QA process and requiring that we boot in the common
 > virtualisation environments as part of the release criteria, but I don't
 > think we can realistically suggest that our virtualisation developers
 > (who work on code that has nothing to do with Virtualbox) be responsible
 > for that.

I'm curious why virtualbox has gained so much inertia so quickly.
Based solely on the number of kernel bug reports we get that seem to be
related to it, I have almost zero confidence in it being reliable.

Why are people choosing it over other solutions, and what can we change
in qemu/kvm to get users using that instead ?

I don't know about anyone else but i found in the days before processors had hardware virtualization support (i think i had an Athlon 64 x2 at the time) VirtualBox seemed to run most things i threw at it at quite a usable speed while all the other open source options seemed to work but the performance was on par with swimming through concrete. Things may have improved since but i only use virtual machines every now and again so i just stick to what's easy.
 
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