virtualbox.org

Hello,

I have not been able to find this information anywhere so I thought I would post a topic:-

How do the VirtualBox developers decide when an operating system is no longer worth being supported as a guest OS?

For example, Windows 2000 has not been supported by Microsoft for a few years now and yet VirtualBox (luckily) still supports it well.

Is anyone here able to suggest how long VirtualBox will support legacy Windows operating systems?

Will it be something to do with when the virtual hardware being emulated in VirtualBox is updated to support new operating systems and can no longer support the old ones as well? Or perhaps some virtual hardware profile selection system will be implemented? (similar to the sound and network card selection already in place).

I only ask because 20+ years from now, I would still love to be able to run my Windows 2000 VMs on my brand new quantum processor

Best Regards,

You should know by now that there are no real guarantees in life. It lasts until it no longer exists or functions.

And one should note that Windows 3.x, for example, does run in VirtualBox even though not supported. So you may get your wish about Win2K even if support is dropped.

I will tell you a small secret: the range of old supported OSes almost does not change.

I mean: VirtualBox was in development since 2005, and the team decided to support NT4 (some features), Win2000 (all features), etc...
Now, for NT4, there are probably business-paying users, that's why it is still supported.
To support Win2000 requires only a minor effort vs. supporting Windows XP, because the code is similar. (as guest)

Basically what the team decided in 2005 is effective until now, with more OSes added but nothing removed. This is set in stone, and I predict will be so, until some fundamental code change will have to break this compatibility, and no paying customers to make it work again.

I do not work for Oracle, but I do some community effort to test various guest. results here

However this policy does not extend to host support:
-Windows 2000 host support dropped in VirtualBox v1.6
-Linux 2.4 host support dropped in v2.1
-Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger host support dropped in v3.1

This is due to the fact, that maintaining host support requires _a lot_ more effort.

As for guest support, old guest OSes do not get some new features:
-old Linux guests (aka RHEL5 and openSUSE 10.2) did not get Multi-Monitor support
-old Linux guests (aka RHEL5 and openSUSE 10.x) did not get 3D acceleration
-Windows 2000 did not get Multi-Monitor support

The reason is that more code needs to be written to support it, while no paying users for those exotic features on old OSes.

-Technologov