Virtualbox Support for 6.x ?

[Martin Kletzander]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 02:14:55PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
>On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 02:46:46PM +0100, CDT CDT wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>>
>> TL;DR: Is there any libvirt update regarding VBox 6.x planned until July
>> 2020?
>>
>>
>> I tried using libvirt 4.x / virsh with Virtualbox 6.1.4, which seem to not
>> work. The output of virsh -V tells me that hypervisor should be able for
>> that:
>>
>> Compiled with support for:
>>
>> Hypervisors: … VirtualBox …
>>
>> If I try to connect to a vbox session I get following error:
>>
>> error: failed to connect to the hypervisor
>>
>> error: internal error: unable to initialize VirtualBox driver API
>>
>> I already saw from different threads messages like this:
>>
>> libvirt version: 5.10.0
>> Libvirt doesn't support VirtualBox API version 6001000
>>
>> regarding the libvirt changelog, only Virtualbox 5.2 is officially
>> supported. Unfortunately, the support/maintenance for Virtualbox 5.2. ends
>> in July 2020. Is there any libvirt update regarding VBox 6.x planned until
>> July 2020?
>
>Unfortunately the people who have previously updated the virtualbox driver
>for libvirt do not appear to be interested in maintaining it any more.
>
>We thus need someone who is interested in virtualbox to step forward and
>volunteer to do work on it in libvirt. Because of the way virtualbox works,
>it needs new COM API definitions importing into libvirt for each release,
>and sometimes code changes in libvirt to adapt to changesin vbox APIs.
>
>I don't know how much work it would be to update libvirt from vbox 5.2
>to newer 6.x versions. It needs someone able todo a little investigation
>
>> And is following combination in general possible: Libvirt + VBox + Windows
>> Guest/VM ?
>
>I would expect that to be working in general.
>

Me too, although I wonder what is the reason for this particular
combination. Have you looked at other possibilities in the Linux world?  In fact
qemu-kvm, which has the most support in libvirt, offers many features and
possibilities.  I'd be surprised if there was a lack of any which VBox would
provide.  Especially if you're using libvirt, I don't think there is any API
written for VBox that would be missing for qemu.  It might be little more
confusing for newcomers as some of the features are provided by external tools
(also open source).  And it is definitely less marketed, but still, it'd be
worth trying it out ;-)

Please consider.

Have a nice day,
Martin

>Regards,
>Daniel
>-- 
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