About a year ago, shortly after if was taken over by Sun, Innotek announced it was looking for FreeBSD developers. Their labours seem to have borne fruit, as a FreeBSD version of Virtualbox has been announced.
VirtualBox 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.
FreeBSD is not (as yet) officially supported, but Sun developers have been working on aFreeBSD version in their spare time.
Though there are still a number of features yet to be implemented and a few known bugs and problems to be squashed, Sun is looking for anyone interested to test this version, give them feedback and/or give a hand improving VirtualBox for FreeBSD.
In the effort to make VirtualBox the most portable platform for virtualization we can announce that VirtualBox is finally running on FreeBSD. http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Screenshots contains two screenshots of VirtualBox running on FreeBSD with a Windows and a Linux guest.
Even though the basic functions are working there are still a lot of things to do and we do not recommend to use it on production machines. Furthermore Sun does not officially support FreeBSD yet. This is a port done by developers in their free time. However if you are a developer or want to test it you can checkout the latest code and build VirtualBox yourself.
Links:
Related posts:
- Sun VirtualBox available as PC-BSD PBI
- Sun VirtualBox on FreeBSD – update
- Virtualbox available in FreeBSD ports
- VirtualBox: how to move FreeBSD to a new hard disk
- FreeBSD as a Host OS (VirtualBox)
May 4th, 2009 at 3:31 am
This is great news as there aren’t many virtualization solutions available on FreeBSD yet. I tried Qemu, but its just way too slow.
May 5th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Now if only they could get FreeBSD to run as a guest under VirtualBox :-) I’ve been trying newer point releases of VB for OS X as they have come out over the past few months, and versions of FreeBSD from 6.2 to the current release candidate, and it merrily core dumps aplenty.
November 18th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
what the gnome theme in that screenshots ???