Oracle VM VirtualBox

A hybrid PC system emulator that uses both software emulation and hardware virtualisation techniques to emulate/virtualise a modern IBM PC compatible computer. It is available in two versions, a proprietary version published by Oracle that is delivered for Microsoft Windows, Solaris, Mac OSX and Linux and an open source version called VirtualBox OSE that lacks a few features but is available on a wider number of platforms, there is no difference between the main executable of the two versions in practice, but since version four of VBox the propriety portion of the program is delivered as a part of the Guest Additions rather than of the main install package.

Because it is free and mostly open source so available on a number of platforms, VirtualBox is popular with OS/2 users both as a host system to run operating systems like Windows and Linux on and thus get access to the software catalogues for those systems on your OS/2 or eComStation machine, but and also as for users that prefer to run OS/2 as a task under other operating systems although in that user case scenario VMware is more popular with corporate and business users for a variety of reasons.

Guest Additions

Similarly to Virtual PC, VirtualBox uses Guest Additions to simplify interaction between the guest operating system and its host, Guest Additions are simply drivers, system extensions and/or applications for the guest OS that interact with VirtualBox or the host OS that allow them to use features such as

Mouse pointer integration
Shared folders
Copy/Paste between host and guest
Drag and drop objects between host and guest
Graphics acceleration and 3D pass through

At this point in time Oracle only ships Guest Additions for Microsoft Windows and OS/2, Drag'n'drop, 3D pass through and shared folders are not supported with the OS/2 versions, these limitations a mildly surprising giving that they are based on the Vitrual PC additions and originally written by the same company (Innotek). Guest Addition exist for Mac OSX as well but are only activated on actual Apple Macintosh hardware for licensing reasons.

Compatibility issues

In general VirtualBox is an excellent PC System emulator and usually the fastest amongst the free ones, if your objective in using it is primarily to run OS/2 on a PC running Mac OSX or MS Windows you may want to take a look at Microsoft's Virtual PC, VMware or Parallels Desktop.

VMware is available in both free and paid versions and is in general more capable, faster and stable than VirtualBox, the paid version in particular. The supplied extensions for OS/2 are superior to the VBox Guest Additions and the system is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.
Parallels Desktop is commercial software derived from SVISTA and is only available for Mac OSX, the OS/2 extensions are roughly on par with the VBox Guest addition in capability but the integration with the host operating system is superior.
Microsoft's Virtual PC is freeware that is supplied built into the Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise editions of Microsoft Windows 7 and higher and available as a free download for Windows 2000, Vista and XP and Win7 and higher versions that do not have it built in. It slower but more flexible than VBox and can even be forced to run as a software only emulator which can be handy and even though the extensions for VirtualBox are basically developed from those for Virtual PC they lack support for shared folders that VPC does support in most versions. Virtual PC is especially a better option if you are running Windows Vista or older.

General

You will sometimes run into install issues with systems that will actually run on VBox with some tweaking but not actually install, some versions of QNX and eComStation v1.x are notable for this for instance. VBox is quite flexible in regards to disk images and can work with or convert a number of alien hard disk image formats allowing us a couple of ways around this including:
- Install the OS on real hardware and transfer the partition into an image file using DFSee.
- Install them OS on Virtual PC or VMware and transfer the hard disk image over to VBox, it will work natively with VPC images and convert VMware ones.

Hardware

There is no serial port virtualisation, only pass through to real serial ports via the Superchip or USB, this does not make serial port debugging on a single PC impossible, just that you will have to assign VirtualBox a serial port and use a crossover cable to hook that port up physically to another serial port on your PC.
On some AMD based Windows systems VirtualBox refuses to run if Hyper-V has been installed or activated even though it is not running at the time, this is a VBox problem rather than a Microsoft problems as other systems like VMware manage to get around this.

OS/2

For VBox to work with OS/2 you will have to have a processor that supports the AMD-V virtualisation extensions or Intel's VT-x clone, that means most Intel processors made after 2006 with the exception of the Atom line and embedded processors and all AMD 64 bit capable processors bar the first generation. This also means that the AMD-V/Intel VT-x feature must be turned on in the settings notebook.
The OS/2 video driver that is part of the Guest Additions requires GENGRADD to be installed. You might run into problems if you install the VBox extensions on top of SNAP, so make sure that you choose GenGRADD rather than the default SNAP when you are installing eCS and install the last version of GenGRADD in the case of OS/2 Warp versions, although fixing this after install on eCS is not a huge problem go to Local System>Install/Remove>Video Driver Wizard, choose GenGRADD and reboot.
For installing eComStation 1 and 1.1 on VirtualBox you may need to disable Nested Paging in the "System>Acceleration" tab on the settings pane, this may be needed on eComStation Preview as well. It is usually OK to enable Nested Paging again after the systems have been installed.
If you want to run a widescreen resolution under VBox-gengradd you may have to run the command VBoxManage setextradata to get a custom resolution and in a worst case scenario edit the \OS2\MONITOR.DIF to gain the modes you require.
If you read the installation instructions for the OS/2-eCS addition you will notice that they ask you to install the extensions exe in a startup.cmd file that does exist on OS/2 but not on eCS, this is not a problem, you can start the extension either from your startup folder or you can create a new startup.cmd in the root of your bootup drive and add the line there, just remember to put the command EXIT to the end of the file.
Mac users of VBox have reported that eComStation will not install with a HPFS boot partition and that you will have to boot from BJFS, this should be fixed in newer versions of the program.
If you are running an old version of VBox (such as the old OS/2 one), nested paging MUST be turned off to run some OS/2 versions as guests excluding eCS 2.x releases, this setting is on the System page in the setting notebook, PAE/NX is slightly more difficult, some 31x versions of VBox will not allow eCS to install if this is on, since you will never make actual use of this under eCS unless you are testing experimental OS/2 bootloaders, it is best turned off, but the default setting is on and in most cases will not matter.

DOS & 16 bit Windows versions

There are no Guest Additions available for DOS or any 16 bit Windows version, you might just as well run your DOS/Win 16 bit programs from an OS/2 or eComStation guest or host. You can copy and paste between an eCS guest Windows and DOS sessions and your VBox host without a hitch.
On top of that VBox has some problems running DOS and Windows 3x, any version of DOS has a tendency to show screen corruption and finding Win3x drivers that work with anything but VGA resolutions is close to impossible.

Versions

Innotek

2005-04-12: 1.0.37
2006-02-03: 1.1.2
2006-11-14: 1.2.2
2007-01-15: 1.3.2 - first free version
2007-06-06: 1.4
2007-09-03: 1.5.0 - OS/2 Warp guest additions
2008-02-19: 1.5.6

Sun Microsystems - Sun xVM VirtualBox

2008-04-30: 1.6.0 - Solaris and Mac OS X host support
2008-09-02: 1.6.6
2008-09-04: 2.0.0 - Clipboard integration for OS/2 Guests
2009-10-20: 2.0.12
2008-12-17: 2.1.0 - Support for hardware virtualization on Mac OS X hosts
2009-02-16: 2.1.4
2009-04-08: 2.2.0 - OVF (Open Virtualization Format) appliance import and export
2009-05-29: 2.2.4
2009-06-30: 3.0.0 - Guest SMP with up to 32 virtual CPUs
2009-11-30: 3.1.0 - Teleportation (live migration)

Oracle VM VirtualBox

2010-03-18: 3.0.14
2010-03-25: 3.1.8
2010-05-18: 3.2.0 - Memory ballooning
2015-05-19: 3.2.28
2015-11-11: 4.0.36
2015-11-11: 4.1.44
2015-11-11: 4.2.36
2016-04-19: 4.3.38 - last version supporting Windows XP host systems
2016-07-18: 5.0.26
2016-07-21: 5.1.2

Links

Licence

The binaries for VirtualBox before version 4.0 are released under the proprietary VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL). This license still applies nowadays if you download the Extension Pack binaries. The VirtualBox OSE (before version 4.0) was open source software released under the GPL v2. As of VirtualBox 4.0 all packages are released under the terms of the GPL version 2.

Publisher

Innotek Systemberatung (Original developer)
Sun Microsystems
Oracle