An alternative open source virtualization solution: VirtualBox

To accelerate the product development and test, we usual choose some kinds of virtualizer to simulate environment, such as VMware workstation, Virtual PC etc. With these kinds of VM, we can build the environment one time, and reuse it again and again, just take snapshot and rollback it.

But if we have some advance requirement, such as control the VM to implement some auto-test script, these commercial products maybe restrict your idea. Even they provided some SDK, the ability is very limited.

Fortunately we have some alternative virtualization solutions, such as VirtualBox. It is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software.

The usage and GUI of VirtualBox is very like VMware, so we can switch to it easy. The VirtualBox can be downloaded and installed on Windows, Linux and OS X hosts; And the guest OS can support mostly common platform, such as Windows, Linux, xxxBSD, etc. A complete guest OS list can be found at Guest OSes. It also has an open source edition under the GPL license, but it isn't including some advance features, such as RDP support.

Compare with VMware or other VM vender, VirtualBox has a great openness. It's virtual machine descriptions in XML, we can easy fetch information from it; It's VM directly support RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) protocol, so we can use remote desktop connection software to control it, the latest version of VMware - Workstation 6.0 provide similar feature which allow remotely access the console of a VM from a VNC client.

Furthermore, the most important difference is VirtualBox provided a very powerful management interface. For end-users, they can use VBoxManage in command line to control most common functions of VM; for developers, they can get some depth control with a set of COM/XPCOM control interfaces, such as control the keyboard/mouse action etc.

From the implementation viewpoint, the architecture of VirtualBox much likes a client/server solution. The controller client, such as QT-based GUI or console mode VBoxManage, connects to the backend VM implementation (VBoxVMM, etc.), through COM/XPCOM interface (VBoxSVC, VBoxC, etc).

In addition, a kernel driver (VBoxDrv.sys on Windows) or module (vboxdrv on Linux) will allocating physical memory for the VM, control the context switch and other dirty work.

But not like Xen and VMware, VirtualBox is not directly depending on some kinds of hardware virtualization technology, such as VT or AMD-V. VirtualBox run the guest OS kernel at ring 1, through some advanced code scanning, analysis and patching techniques, such as "Patch Manager" (PATM) and "Code Scanning and Analysis Manager" (CSAM).

Before executing ring 0 code, we scan it recursively to discover problematic instructions. We then perform in-situ patching, i.e. we replace the instruction with a jump to hypervisor memory where an integrated code generator has placed a more suitable implementation. In reality, this is a very complex task as there are lots of odd situations to be discovered and handled correctly. So, with its current complexity, one could argue that PATM is an advanced in-situ recompiler.

In addition, every time a fault occurs, we analyze the fault's cause to determine if it is possible to patch the offending code to prevent it from causing more expensive faults in the future. This turns out to work very well, and we can reduce the faults caused by our virtualization to a rate that performs much better than a typical recompiler, or even VT-x technology, for that matter.

This method seems specially but effective, at least on my machine, VirtualBox run some OS correctly and very fast.

If you have more detail question, please refer to their Developer FAQ or directly read the source code. :)