VirtualBox on Silverblue

I have an oddball requirement to run a VM packaged as a VirtualBox image. Looking at Silverblue it seems this isn’t going to be easy to do in a way that won’t be fighting the system.

I am fairly certain this requires a kernel driver, which as far as I know isn’t supported at all in Silverblue. I am hoping I am wrong, so I continued thinking:

  • As far as I know, there is no flatpak version of this software.
  • It doesn’t seem like this is appropriate to try to run in a container as I will be reinventing flatpak.
  • Finally, my takeaway from conversations at devconf.us was that this isn’t a good candidate for adding via rpm-ostree install as it doesn’t extend the OS and sets me up for big future conflicts.

Is there a good solution here? Should I wait to use Silverblue until after this requirement goes away?

2 Likes

Hey,

we just added some virtualbox support in the Fedora kernel: Changes/VirtualBox Guest Integration - Fedora Project Wiki

Is this the driver you need ?

See Implement compatibility with DKMS (Nvidia, etc.) · Issue #1091 · coreos/rpm-ostree · GitHub for the DKMS discussion.

2 Likes

Some colleagues and me had the same issue.

I just wanted to comment that VirtualBox is now running just fine on our SB laptops. We only had to enable the rpmfusion repos and install the VirtualBox rpm. No additional rpms (such as kernel-devel or akmod-VirtualBox) were needed.

So I would like to thank all who made that possible!

5 Likes

I don’t know if this would work in your specific situation, but I frequently convert VirtualBox images to qcow2 and use them with KVM/libvirt - which is easily installed on Silverblue. Look at qemu-img’s conversion commands - it might offer some help!

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Hi, i just installed Virtualbox and i cant install ExtensionPacks since the folder does not exist and the directory is read-only.
I need to enable PCIe passtrough. Any way i can do that in Silverblue using Virtualbox?