Linux Lake 21: Virtual Machine Experience VirtualBox-a classic architecture with great performance

The first two experiences the QEMU and KVM accelerated qemu, and experience the third-party virtual machine management tool Virt-manager, giving us a glimpse of the high quality and high performance of the open source community's powerful and open-source virtual machine software. In this article, let me dissect the VirtualBox. VirtualBox claims to be the most powerful virtual machine product in the current open source industry, and on the Linux platform, it is basically chosen as the preferred virtual machine software. VirtualBox's strength is not covered, after all, the next Taiwan is the super-rich Oracle Company. VirtualBox's Caprice is not covered, it simply does not use the same as I described earlier, the QEMU, KVM, libvirt, etc. are used by various virtual machine open source components, its front-end, back-end and kernel accelerator modules are self-developed, The only VNC required for Remote Desktop is the use of libvncserver.

I said in the title that Virutalbox is the classic architecture used. The so-called classic, mainly reflected in the following aspects:

1. The system (guest system) in the virtual machine and virtual machine is still running on the main operating system (host systems) and is only accelerated by the kernel module of the main operating system;

The classic architecture of the front-end mode in the 2.Unix system, in VirtualBox, VirtualBox's graphical interface is simply a graphical wrapper for the virtual machine software vboxmanage the command line interface, and it also provides VBOXSDL, Vboxheadless and other command-line tools. For example, Vboxheadless can run a virtual machine that does not display a virtual machine desktop, and if you want to display the desktop, you can run a Remote Desktop connection to it. The benefit of front-end separation is that for desktop users, you can use the graphical interface of the front-end to simplify operations, and for enterprise users, you can use command-line tools to build automated scripts and even run virtual machines automatically at system startup.

I didn't like VirtualBox from the start, and a little episode almost made me miss out on such a good virtual machine software. Originally I just started to see in each Linux forum to put VirtualBox in the first place, rather than in the news overwhelming KVM, Xen, I think Virutalbox may be a bit unprofessional, plus the first time when using VirtualBox, found that it could not be perfectly forwarded ctrl+alt+fx (X=1~12), found that some of its configuration can not be fully set in the graphical interface, need to manually change the configuration file, and then I gave up. Until I mastered the correct toss of the Linux methodology, after reading its 369-page user manual, I really understood its power and fell deeply in love with it.

First of all, installing Virutalbox in Ubuntu is very easy and requires only a sudo apt-get install VirtualBox.

After installing VirtualBox, you can look at the "classic architecture" that I mentioned earlier, command and run results such as:

The Lsmod command can see that after the VirtualBox installation, several kernel modules are installed in the main operating system to speed up the virtual machine. For images that use kernel modules to accelerate virtual machines I will not post here, please refer to my previous article. The Dpkg-l command allows you to examine which command-line tools are provided by VirtualBox. Finally, through the dpkg-s command can see, VirtualBox this executable program is actually belong to VIRTUALBOX-QT software package, it is just a graphical interface encapsulation.

Start VirtualBox, create a new virtual machine and install the operating system I will not say more, the graphical interface is very powerful, step by step implementation is correct. After installing WinXP, the effect is as follows:

As you can see from this diagram, the CPU recognized by the WinXP system is the exact Intel Core i7-4770k, although I only assigned two cores to it. But the video card does not accurately identify. This is because there is no corresponding driver in the WinXP system, so it is necessary to install VirtualBox's Customer System enhancement tool. In the menu bar, select Install enhancements such as:

Then VirtualBox will install a virtual disc to WinXP, double-click on the disc, you can install the Customer System Enhancement tool in the WinXP system, such as:

The Customer System Enhancement tool is installed in the guest systems and can be thought of as a customer system enhancement tool that mainly contains the drivers needed in the customer's operating system, because without these drivers, the client operating system may not be able to recognize the virtual hardware, such as virtual graphics. Of course, the capabilities of the Customer system enhancement tools are much more than this, such as graphics 3D acceleration Ah, the main operating system and the customer operating system shared folders Ah what, and one of the most bull B, that is to let the customer operating system into seamless mode. For example, after installing the User Enhancement tool, you can identify the type of video card and have different resolution options, such as:

By pressing the HOST+L key, you can type in seamless mode, as you can see in Ubuntu system, Ubuntu-style windows and WinXP-style windows coexist:

Play a little bigger and use IE to access the blog park, such as:

Thus, it is no longer a dream to work with Windows software in a Linux system. Press the Host+l key again, and the virtual opportunity returns to the window mode.

VirtualBox is a very powerful feature and it's impossible to learn this blog post alone. Fortunately, it's me. This series has always been adhering to the "give people to fish than to give people to fishing," the principle has been to guide the methodology of the Linux system, and stickers so that no hands-on opportunity of the people also have an intuitive experience of Linux system, also has been pointed out from where to find the corresponding learning materials. With the Dpkg-l command, you can find the 369-page document I mentioned earlier, VirtualBox, using Ubuntu's own evince reader, such as:

As for the VirtualBox I said earlier, this can't be anything, it's all my own nonsense, and when you're finished with the documentation, you'll find that it can do anything. As far as the VirtualBox on my machine, the smoothness should exceed the previous QEMU+KVM combination, and the graphics performance will be more powerful. There are more advanced gameplay in its documentation, read it carefully, be proficient in command line and configuration files is not a dream, and VirtualBox not only for desktop users, for enterprise-class applications, it is also possible.

(Jingshan Ranger in 2015-03-04 published in the blog Park, reproduced please indicate the source. ）

Linux Lake 21: Virtual Machine Experience VirtualBox-a classic architecture with great performance