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

[Lonnie Cumberland]

Thanks for your response on this, Klaus as it is truly appreciated.

The goal was to see if it would be possible, and reasonable, to try and get
VirtualBox to be the VMM for a new hypervisor designed to have a small
footprint to offer much less attack surfaces as well as to run ram-based
for a Cloud distribution. I like many features of VirtualBox and
thought that it might be a good combination, but it sounds like a
tremendous amount of work just to get a VMM using VirtualBox setup.

The project goal is to create a new use case for VirtualBox that will allow
it to take advantage of the current broad capabilities of VirtualBox while
bringing a new paradigm for cloud computing.

I may have to look into possibly using QEMU, or Bhyve, or maybe the
Intel+Amazon+google collaboration project "Cloud-Hypervisor" which part of
the Firecracker and Rust-VMM project but still in the early stages of
development as an alternative although wanted to see if it was possible to
work with Oracle on this first, I guess.

Cheers and have a good day,
Lonnie

On Mon, Jul 12, 2021 at 1:19 PM Klaus Espenlaub <klaus.espenlaub at oracle.com>
wrote:

> 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
>
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