Why Fireinfo does not show VirtualBox among the hypervisors?

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As in subject, on the Fireinfo webpage I see only VMware, KVM, Microsoft, Xen.

Is it because VirtualBox by default uses KVM to accelerate Linux guests, or because it is very rarely used for IPFire?

I ask this because I’m using it without any issues right now, and IMHO it is a very capable and reliable virtualization software nowadays.

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It might be that VirtualBox is being used by less than 1% of the 38% of users using a vm as the top hypervisors amount to 99.1%, so others accounts for 0.9%

It may be a capable and reliable virtualisation software but I would never run my production Firewall on a vm.

I also use VirtualBox for IPFire but it is used only for development and testing purposes and those vm systems are safely behind a physical hardware IPFire that is connected to the Internet.

The security concerns are covered in the Wiki.

https://www.ipfire.org/docs/hardware/virtual#security-considerations

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Yes I’m also running IPFire on VirtualBox only for testing purposes, my real IPFire system is going to run on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, to protect my home network. However also my testing system is sending its Fireinfo profile, and I guess also others do, so I would have expected to see more VirtualBox hypervisors in the stats…

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BTW I added reference to VirtualBox in the Wikipedia IPFire page

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If you are able to edit that page you might want to correct the architectures that are supported as i686 & i586, the 32 bit versions, have not been supported since the start of 2022 with Core Update 163.

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I just did it, and I also updated the Italian page

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I find hard to believe that VirtualBox is used less than Xen though, my doubt is that Fireinfo is not distinguishing VirtualBox from KVM, can someone verify this?

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I see the virtualization as more for experimental enthusiast and net lab experimentation than something put into production use.

Because it increases the attack surface of the system.

Granted, its better than running it in a BSD based system that completely compromises it. But there are real solutions to this.

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Yes, but my doubt is that Fireinfo could be failing to recognize Virtualbox among the different hypervisors, it is a very common SW so it is difficult to believe that it’s being used in less than 5% of all the virtualization systems… Maybe someone who has full visibility of the statistical data could verify if Virtualbox is detected at smaller percent values or not at all?

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Type2 hypervisors are not that great at this because this is an OS that is designed for bare metal. So if you want to use a hypervisor, get a server board that has a type 1 built in.

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But IPFire has a paravirt kernel with additional bare metal support

[     0.074657] Booting paravirtualized kernel on bare hardware

If you found this message VirtualBox doesn’t report the virtualizer if not i think it uses kvm.

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Could you update this entry? :wink:
obraz

Regards

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I’ve just updated that and some other template info.

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Oh my bad… I now looked at my Fireinfo profile under “System > Sytem Information”, it was so easy but I did not think about this before…

I’m running IPFire under VirtualBox, and this is my profile:

{
     "profile": {
...
         "hypervisor": {
             "vendor": "KVM"
         },
...
         "system": {
             "kernel_release": "6.6.63-ipfire",
             "language": "en.utf8",
             "memory": 4017076,
             "model": "VirtualBox",
             "release": "IPFire 2.29 (x86_64) - core191",
             "root_size": 8388608.0,
             "vendor": "innotek GmbH",
             "virtual": true
         }
     },
...
 }

So now everything is clear, and confirms what I thought: VirtualBox is actually detected as KVM hypervisor, and very likely it makes up for the majority of the KVM hypervisor percentage, just below VMWare.

IMHO systems with “model = VirtualBox” should be labeled as “VirtualBox” instead of “KVM” in the Firinfo webpage.

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