VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a virtualisation hypervisor. It has powerful a GUI included for managing virtual machines.

NixOS Installation

VirtualBox can be installed on NixOS without problems, put this snippet in your configuration.nix

{
   virtualisation.virtualbox.host.enable = true;
   users.extraGroups.vboxusers.members = [ "user-with-access-to-virtualbox" ];
}

Adding users to the group vboxusers allows them to use the virtualbox functionality.

Tip

In order to affect your NixOS system by your nix-language-specific changes you must first evaluate it:

$ nixos-rebuild switch --use-remote-sudo

Tip

When starting a VM, you may run into NS_ERROR_FAILURE. If you check the log you might see something like

  00:00:00.616892 Audio: Initializing ALSA driver

In this case, the audio driver causes a crash. This can be fixed by switching to another driver such as PULSE.

Warning: Ensure that you do not put virtualbox into your environment.systemPackages when you've enabled it with virtualisation.virtualbox.host.enable = true. If you put virtualbox into your environment.systemPackages, VirtualBox won't be able to access it's driver, and attempting to start a VM will fail with the error NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0X80004005).

VirtualBox Oracle Extensions

Note: This package is unfree and requires extra steps to install.

Oracle VirtualBox Extensions are required if you want to forward usb2 or usb3 to your guests. The Extensions are unfree.

{
   nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true;
   virtualisation.virtualbox.host.enable = true;
   virtualisation.virtualbox.host.enableExtensionPack = true;
}

Tip

If USB forwarding is only advanced feature used in virtualization, then consider using an open-source virtualization solution such as GNOME Boxes or Virt-manager to avoid frequent recompilations..

Warning: Host extensions cause frequent recompilation.

Possible solutions:

• Use a pinned vbox module, see how to pin: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/41212
• Also see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48838411/install-virtualbox-modules-from-nixos-unstable-in-configuration-nix
• Use module from https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/71127 (unsafe) if you'd like to avoid recompilation.
• Use Virt-manager instead of VirtualBox

VirtualBox Guest Additions

{
  virtualisation.virtualbox.guest.enable = true;
  virtualisation.virtualbox.guest.dragAndDrop = true;
}

See also

• virtualisation.virtualbox options