Liang Suilong wrote:
VirtualBox allows users to use a real partition for VMs, however, there is no GUI tools for doing that. You have to use VBoxManage command. User manual tells you how to do that.
This is - as you mentioned - a deliberate decision. There are certain features in VirtualBox which are only available on the command line. The reason is that the GUI should be reasonably safe for all users, including beginners. And think about how often you (or others) would use this feature - would you really gain a lot by GUI support? Additionally we'd rather spend the available resources on things which have more impact. If you want you can contribute GUI support, provided that it addresses the basic usability requirements of such a dangerous feature.
I repeat the reasons below, but they have been mentioned several times already, and so far I haven't seen any reason to change our position.
Why don't they offer a GUI tool for managing real partitions? An official announcement says that VM running in a real partition is too unsafe. If some guy modifies some files on this partition in the host, VM maybe crashes. In fact, we can turn off the write privilege to prohibit any modifications. So I do not know why VirtualBox does not offer a GUI tool for managing real partitions for VM.
The argument "can turn off write privilege" isn't worth anything in reality. All relevant guest OSes totally freak out on readonly hard disks/partitions. They assume that they can write to filesystems, and they will do that usually immediately on mounting.
Most Windows users (and a quickly growing number of users of other OSes) don't know how to avoid mounting filesystems which should be used by the guest - and thus both the host and the guest could potentially perform writes. This can lead to severe filesystem corruption, data loss, host/guest OS crashes and what not.
If we offered it in the GUI users would play with it, and destroy their data. All such user errors would be attributed to VirtualBox. That's why we have documented this in the manual (with a very clear warning), and use the command line to discourage inexperienced users.
Showing some text in a confirmation dialog box isn't the same thing. Users don't read such dialogs. They just click around to make them disappear. This is clearly visible by the frequency in which people ask "how do I leave seamless mode?" - the information was shown to them in a confirmation dialog just minutes ago usually.
There is no point in discussing this over and over again, unless you have a really convincing argument (and a safe to use GUI prototype would count as one) how to make this sufficiently safe.
Klaus _______________________________________________ vbox-users mailing list vbox-users@virtualbox.org http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-users
