virtualbox-kvm

ith bug reports that are the fault of the vboxdrv. Presumably it's better nowadays, but out-of-tree modules are generally a source of headache. Another good one is features: Virtualbox has a lot of great features for desktop end users, but QEMU can do a whole lot more; it supports absolutely tons of architectures and system options. You get access to a wide range of paravirtualization devices through Virtio drivers, including VirtioFS, a dramatically superior solution for mounting directories into VMs versus Virtualbox's Shared Folders feature, in my opinion. It's also possible to do a lot more advanced things, like setting up a discrete GPU passthrough and Looking Glass, or passing a portion of your Intel iGPU using GVT-g.[2] Of course, some day Virtualbox may support a KVM backend, just as virtualization tools are starting to support unified hypervisor backends on Windows and macOS. There's even an existing patch, though I do not know what the status is and whether or not it could ever be merged upstream.[3] So maybe in the future, choosing between Virtualbox or KVM will become unnecessary. For now though, it's definitely not clear what you should recommend to someone IMO. (For this particular use case, I don't even recommend a VM at all; I think for Windows 95, 86Box is a better solution.) [1]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317 [2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_GVT-g [3]: https://github.com/cyberus-technology/virtualbox-kvm, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300317