There was some discussion on this list some time ago about
various VM platforms, and I have now found some reports of (to
put it mildly) some dissatisfaction about VirtualBox which may
be useful to know:
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2012/134/Kernel-News
VirtualBox Tainting
Dave Jones had some harsh things to say about VirtualBox.
He said, “The number of bug reports we get from people with
VirtualBox loaded are truly astonishing. It’s GPL, but sadly
that doesn’t mean it’s good. Nearly all of these bugs look
like random corruption (corrupt linked lists, corrupt page
tables, and just plain ‘weird’ crashes).”
He posted a patch to taint kernels that had VirtualBox loaded,
in a similar way that kernels using features from the staging
directory are tainted. This way, automatic bug-reporting tools
can opt out of filing bugs for kernels that use those features
that are known to be problematic.
Of Dave’s four-line patch, one of the lines was the single
comment /* vbox is garbage. */. Greg Kroah-Hartman liked the
patch so much he said he’d add it to the openSUSE kernels,
which got lots of bug reports because of just that driver. He
also added, “we should have a list of these types of modules,
as I think there are a few others out there we should mark
this way.”
In my experience Xen and KVM/QEMU usually work well (and as I
mentioned before VMWare Server displeased me but more because of
odd performance issues than outright unreliability).
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