Running apps in VirtualBox virtual machines

BOINC's vboxwrapper program lets you run applications in virtual machines. This eliminates the need to build app versions for different architectures, and provides a stronger security sandbox than is otherwise available.

To do this, create an application version of plan class "vbox" containing the following files:

• The VM image (VirtualBox format). Must have the copy_file attribute. Must have logical name "vm_image.vdi".
• An XML job description file (see below)
• vboxwrapper, compiled for the platform

Include <dont_throttle/> in the version.xml file; VirtualBox does its own CPU throttling.

Job description file

vboxwrapper takes an input file vbox_job.xml with the following structure:

<vbox_job>
   <os_name>name</os_name>
   <memory_size_mb>N</memory_size_mb>
   [ <enable_network_access/> ]
   [ <enable_shared_directory/> ]
</vbox_job>

The elements are:

os_name

the name of the guest OS, e.g. "Linux26" or "Linux26_64".

memory_size_mb

the amount of physical memory allocated to the VM, in megabytes.

enable_network_access

if present, allow application in the VM to do network access

enabled_shared_directory

if present, use a directory that is shared between the host OS and the guest OS. Must be set if your application has input or output files.

Requirements of the VM

The VM image, when booted, must run the application. This is typically done using a script in /etc.

When the application is finished, it must shut down the VM (e.g., by running shutdown on Linux).

If the applications has input or output files, the VM must contain the VirtualBox "guest additions", and it must mount the shared directory using

mount -t vboxsf share ~/host

where "~/host" is the path where the shared directory is to be mounted. Typically it will then cd into that directory to run the application.