It seems Oracle is hellbent on destroying whatever good Sun had done to the Open Source Ecosystem. The latest product to get the axe seems to be none other than the Flagship Virtualization program xVM VirtualBox.

Ever since VirtualBox 3.2 was released (the first version to officially carry Oracle banding), VBox has been on a downhill ride. While the much-hyped Virtualization of Mac OS X Server works only on a Mac OS X host (there are ways of working around that limitation), virtualization support for almost all existing OSes seems to have gone south drastically.

Windows XP randomly crashes inside VirtualBox, some GNU/Linux operating systems show severe instability, the support for EFI emulation for 64-bit operating systems never works, and there are nagging problems with network and sound.

VirtualBox 3.1's guest additions installed and worked perfectly inside the free Windows clone ReactOS, with the exception of network drivers. But as expected, the GAs of VirtualBox 3.2.6 completely crash ReactOS.

We conducted some tests of our own, using VirtualBox versions 3.2.6, both PUEL and OSE, and VirtualBox 3.1.8, only PUEL, both on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Edition and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx AMD64.

All tests show that VirtualBox 3.2 lacks any semblance of stability, crashing any operating system running on it randomly. VirtualBox 3.1.8, using the binary-only release for Linux, works like a charm. It is also apparent that VirtualBox 3.2.6 is a lot slower and sometimes unresponsive, as compared to version 3.1.8.

A fresh install of VirtualBox 3.2.0 on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Edition even managed to completely crash the Windows Networking Subsystem, necessitating the uninstallation of VirtualBox.

We'll leave you to do the tests for yourself and draw your own conclusions. What is impossible to understand is why Oracle would try to shoot themselves in the leg by crippling VirtualBox.

-- by Boudhayan Gupta (BaloneyGeek)

[The author is not associated with Muktware. Muktware is not responsible for the opinion expressed by the author.]

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