[vbox-dev] Compiling Virtualbox for just a single VM

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Hello Lonnie,

On 2021-07-02 15:00, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am working on a project that needs a good VMM but the catch is that 
> I just need the VMM to run a single VM.
>
> Virtualbox has done some great development and made huge advancements 
> over the years and I am wondering if it might be a viable approach to 
> consider trying to re-compile it to only run 1 VM instance.

There is no pre-canned build option to limit VirtualBox to a single VM. 
It could be done with a non-negligible amount of work.

How much you can eliminate depends on what you want to achieve. All 
currently available ways to run a VM assume that the API is present 
which is a pretty big chunk. In the old days (until VirtualBox 4.2.x) 
there used to be a VM frontend called VBoxBFE which offered a subset of 
the functionality of the VirtualBox functionality without using the API. 
Purely available as source code, mostly intended for the first few 
experiments when porting VirtualBox to a new platform. It was never part 
of the release packages.

It's doable, but for the VirtualBox product this wasn't considered an 
important use case.

Klaus
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Best Regards,
> Lonnie