Just out of curiosity. Are there any advantages to running virtualbox as oppose to qemu-kvm?

qemu is CLI based. VirtualBox is GUI based.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a CLI guy at heart[1]. But with VBox, there's a whole heap of stuff I don't need to learn just to set up a VM... It steps you through the setup process.

[1] I say that as the guy who wrote this: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...kware64-38604/

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Well, not exactly. With libvirt there are tons of GUI tools for Qemu.

Been using Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager) myself.. I'm kind of wondering if virtualbox is becoming irrelevant, to me it seems qemu-kvm with libvirt has reached feature parity with virtualbox.

Yeah, but those are add-ons.
I'd say no, because they're different programs with different strengths. Speaking for myself, I use both for different purposes.
No doubt. But surely there is enough room for more than 1 solution?

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Yes yes yes, but now that we clarified that, back to the original question.

What are the advantages of using virtualbox over qemu-kvm? You seem to be the right guy to ask actually.


I've used both myself, and in the context of Slackware, it seems it would be easier to use qemu-kvm. I'm wondering if there are any losses to doing that, as oppose to using virtualbox. To me it seems it would be way easier and safer to setup a working qemu-kvm with libvirt+manager than virtualbox. If I'm not mistaken virtualbox would require a reboot even.

Ps. I'm using neither virtualbox or qemu-kvm in Slackware.

That might depend upon how you choose to install it.

I download the pre-compiled script from their website and use that to install VBox, and have done it that way since the "innotek" days.
It doesn't require a reboot if you install the pre-compiled version. The script compiles the modules for the currently running kernel and then loads them. If you're upgrading, it replaces the loaded modules with no need for a reboot. Got a machine here that's never been rebooted (though it's only 4 months old) and has had a few versions of VBox on it now. It'll be rebooted when Slackware 15 is released!

If you were compiling it from source, I'd say you might be right. I can't say with 100% certainty, since I've never done it that way myself... Can't see the point really. Their binary works well enough that I've never even considered it.

But it is quite easy to install QEMU from source. I'll have a play around with virt manager because I'm keen to try it now.

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I'd be interested to hear your opinion about the differences.

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A new test build, 6.1.27-146314, has been posted at, https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Testbuilds

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ended with a segfault here
same with stable release ...

Versions 6.1.27-146035, 6.1.27-146191 and 6.1.27-146314, have all ran perfectly on this box using -current.

This is the update crash I referred to in my earlier post. You can prevent it from happening by disabling the update check on start up:

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thanks rkelsen
It's been a long time since I had an error, I missed this one ;-)

So supposedly Oracle fixed this issue, but does anyone notice that when you have a Slackware host , it still rebuilds the modules anyways after installation guest additions?

fixed in the latest testbuilds
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ml#post6272156
and testbuilds:
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Testbuilds

I am running 6.1.26 r145957 and that is the latest stable build. So, I guess until it is on the next stable build I will keep seeing this.