Idea Excursion

You’ve got to admit, the VirtualBox team is nothing if not consistent. Despite the complexity of a project such as theirs, the release schedule has been admirable. Major releases arrive periodically, but more importantly, all those annoying little bugs are shored up quickly. 3.0.6 marks the third bugfix release of the 3.0-series and the changelog is a bit longer than usual for such a build.

According to the VirtualBox Web Console Blog, quite a few of the fixes released are directly related to requests from that project. As noted in my preview, VirtualBox Web Console is a great idea, but is just too immature for use. With this new VirtualBox version, hopefully that problem will fix itself even faster.

Aside from Python API-replated adjustments, there’s nothing too out of the ordinary, but I see a couple things that pique my interest:

• VRDP remote USB protocol 3
  • At first, I thought this had to do with USB 3.0, but it turns out, this is simply an update that “allows to send large packets as fragments” – whatever that means.
• Restricts guest RAM site to 1.5GB with 32-bit Windows hosts
  • A curious inclusion. Why should it be restricted at all? According to a forum moderator, “there is no room in the 32 bits virtual address space to map the whole guest ram”. I don’t understand how this suddenly changed from prior releases.

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Sun posted a note on the front page of the VirtualBox website noting a new project in development sure to make administrating virtual machines much simpler. The project is called VirtualBox Web Console and aims to replicate the VirtualBox console in Web 2.0 fashion. In their own words,

The mission of the VirtualBox Web Console project is very simple: implement the VirtualBox user interface using modern Web 2.0 techniques like AJAX. It will start with very little functionality but our intention is to grow this quickly into a very powerful and easy to use web interface for either a single VirtualBox host or a group of hosts.

The code is certainly its infancy and it seems that those responsible for its development plan on taking advantage of community contributions — as evidenced by being hosted on Google Code. The team has a few blog posts outs, but it’s really too early to tell how responsive they’ll be to the community at large.

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