Virtualbox Portable may be possible

[DeGarcen]

It may be possible the same way Firefox is portable on non-privileged computer, or always will depend on windows services so you will need to be admin on that computer?

[vbox4me2]

VBP is not supported by Sun, they have their own forum.

[Sasquatch]

Not only that, but VB is a lot more complicated than a browser. A browser doesn't have kernel hooks and advanced hardware calls, VB does. To be able to use these hooks and APIs, you need to install a driver/module first and that requires admin privileges.
The Portable version that is already out there, unsupported and not maintained by Sun, found a way around this, but it will have it's own problems too.

[DeGarcen]

Not only that, but VB is a lot more complicated than a browser. A browser doesn't have kernel hooks and advanced hardware calls, VB does. To be able to use these hooks and APIs, you need to install a driver/module first and that requires admin privileges.
The Portable version that is already out there, unsupported and not maintained by Sun, found a way around this, but it will have it's own problems too.

The portable version I have downloaded does not work at all on unprivileged computers, so it is not very userful. Thanks for your information.

[DeGarcen]

I realize that Qemu can work without kqemu (kernel module). Why is mandatory for Virtualbox to use kernel module? Couldn´t be better be able to use the two options, (install/uninstall kernel module like I can do with Qemu Manager)?

I wonder if a night build can be made with this kind of configuration.

[chungy]

QEMU gets away with it because, by default, it is just an emulator, not a virtualizer like VirtualBox or what KQEMU turns it into. Which is also why QEMU without the KQEMU driver is much slower than with it.

[DeGarcen]

QEMU gets away with it because, by default, it is just an emulator, not a virtualizer like VirtualBox or what KQEMU turns it into. Which is also why QEMU without the KQEMU driver is much slower than with it.

I really don´t know what the difference is, but for a regular user like me there is no such difference, except that qemu looks much more flexible. If is much slower, at least allows you to use it on non privileged computers, where is impossible for VMware, parallels, VirtualPC, virtualbox and so on. For me, Qemu with Qemu Manager is the deal.

Could you explain me in a couple of lines what is the difference between an emulator and a virtualizer?

[chungy]

basically, an emulator re-implements hardware in software and allows you to run foreign software on your computer; although x86 on x86 isn't that "foreign", the software is still taking the job to translate the machine language into your host environment to run it in a contained setting. A virtualizer only runs on the same hardware itself and tries to run as many possible instructions on your host CPU unmodified; to do this the virtualizer needs a special driver installed on the operating system that allows it to pass instructions directly to your CPU in manners that are not normally possible in protected mode OSes.

Probably not explained the best, but you can hit up Wikipedia for a few days and maybe you'll get it... if it just confuses you, you don't really need to know the difference. Just use QEMU as your "portable VM" and put up with it being slower.

[DeGarcen]

basically, an emulator re-implements hardware in software and allows you to run foreign software on your computer; although x86 on x86 isn't that "foreign", the software is still taking the job to translate the machine language into your host environment to run it in a contained setting. A virtualizer only runs on the same hardware itself and tries to run as many possible instructions on your host CPU unmodified; to do this the virtualizer needs a special driver installed on the operating system that allows it to pass instructions directly to your CPU in manners that are not normally possible in protected mode OSes.

Probably not explained the best, but you can hit up Wikipedia for a few days and maybe you'll get it... if it just confuses you, you don't really need to know the difference. Just use QEMU as your "portable VM" and put up with it being slower.

i understand it pretty well. But, does Qemu run slower even with KQemu installed? It shouldn´t, should it? Even if happens, it compensates me, because it allows no run on non privileged computers, where i cannot install kqemu. Probably, few people has my requirements but I do.

[mpack]

Sorry, but you might as well ask for the moon. Virtualbox's selling points are (a) it's a very fast virtualizer, and (b) it's free for most people. Virtualbox simply isn't an emulator, so comparing it with one, and asking for it to behave like one, is pointless. If you need an emulator like Qemu then you shouldn't be using Virtualbox, you should be using Qemu. I don't see a good reason for VBox to reinvent that wheel.

[DeGarcen]

Thank you, the whole point was that i didn´t know that there were both virtualizers and emulators, and a clear difference between them (wikipedia messes up sometimes), and that virtualizers go faster but are less flexible, because are much more hardware dependent and need administrative rights to be run.That´s a question of fitting needs.

As far as I am aware, Qemu is free too, LGPL-like licenses, or at least does not cost money.

[mpack]

Thank you, the whole point was that i didn´t know that there were both virtualizers and emulators, and a clear difference between them (wikipedia messes up sometimes)

I sympathize. In my opinion the conventional naming of these technologies is unfortunate, because "virtualizers" do emulate some things, and "emulators" are actually much more "virtual" than a virtualizer!

The most important difference however, in my opinion, is that a virtualizer does the minimum possible to get the software to run on the host PC. For the most part the guest software is running "natively", ie. running directly on the real host processor at full speed and without interference. It's only when the guest software does something that requires privileges - for example it tries to affect the hardware in some way - that the virtualizer software steps in and does the minimum necessary to translate that into something appropriate on the real host hardware.

Emulators however are completely virtual, including the processor. The guest software never runs natively, which means that the guest and host processors can be different (eg. you could do XBox emulation on a PC). And of course, since the emulator software isn't required to do strange things (like trapping hardware accesses) then it doesn't need to run in special priveliged modes (or include drivers that run in those modes). Emulators also obviously run much slower than native.

As far as I am aware, Qemu is free too, LGPL-like licenses, or at least does not cost money.

I didn't mean to imply that every attractive feature of VBox was unique to VBox.

[Technologov]

I wrote an article very long time ago regarding that:

Virtualization Theory:
http://forgeftp.novell.com/lfl/.html/vi ... ation.html

-Technologov

[DeGarcen]

I wrote an article very long time ago regarding that:

Virtualization Theory:
http://forgeftp.novell.com/lfl/.html/vi ... ation.html

-Technologov

Thank you for sharing.

As stated in here, Qemu +accelerators (KVM, QVM, KQemu) has the same performance that VirtualBox when using acceleration.

[mpack]

As stated in here, Qemu +accelerators (KVM, QVM, KQemu) has the same performance that VirtualBox when using acceleration.

Understood, but "QEMU+accelerator" is no longer an emulator, and in that mode will require the same extra access privileges as any other virtualizer: hence the answer to your question, can you get VBox performance without the higher privileges, is still no.