On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 05:51:19 -0800 Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 3:21 AM, Alan McKinnon > <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:17:07 +0100 > > Nicolas Sebrecht <nsebre...@piing.fr> wrote: > > > >> The 22/11/11, Alan McKinnon wrote: > >> > >> > I use virtualbox and it's the one I recommend. > >> > > >> > The kernel modules are no better and no worse than any other > >> > out-of-tree modules. > >> > >> You're wrong. Using the virtualbox module means you turn the > >> kernel to "tained crap" because of the number of problems it > >> causes, including random memory curruption. > >> > > > > > > Care to back that up with something resembling evidence? > > > > EVERY out-of-tree module will taint the kernel. As to whether it > > deserves the "crap" moniker is a matter of opinion > > > > -- > > Alan McKinnnon > > alan.mckin...@gmail.com > > > > > > Alan, > I'm a happy Virtualbox user so I was surprised to see this post on > the LKML which I suspect pushed the consciousness of this a bit more > to the forefront: > > https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317 > > Now, I have no problems with Virtualbox but I have no reason to > disbelieve these folks either. As with a lot of these things, it's the > devil you know or the devil you don't know. I suspect the other less > used solutions also have problems but not as many users, etc. > > - Mark > Mark, I too am a happy VirtualBox user. I find it works better and is far more stable than either VMWare or Nvidia drivers. Or Flash for that matter. I also know the Linux kernel devs have incredibly high standards - mere perfection is often just not good enough - a very good trait in a dev. I put it down to a distinct lack of technical design not being driven by a corporate Sales department :-) Having said that, Dave's mail sounds a lot like me sounding off on a good day after the Nth clueless user pissed me off one time too many - he makes a startling claim and then proceeds to not back it up, but just rant. Lets grant that the VirtualBox modules are not up to LKML standards. That's fine, very little out of the tree is. I'm willing to bet that the majority of the issues are silly bugs involving pointer arithmetic (the usual cause of these things) and could be fixed up with minimal effort. Either way I don't think a sweeping condemnation of the entire product is the right way to go. Oh, I forgot something in the first paragraph. In my experience on this machine we can add Firefox, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice to the same list of unstable software. -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
