ACRN Hypervisor vs GNOME Boxes

ACRN Hypervisor is a free, open-source Type 1 hypervisor stack for embedded IoT development. It runs directly on Intel x86 bare-metal hardware and supports Linux, Windows and RTOS guests such as Zephyr; the project also lists VxWorks, Xenomai, Celadon and Android. CPU, I/O and networking virtualization are included, with I/O mediators for sharing graphics and audio across virtual machines. Resource partitioning is designed for safety-critical and non-safety-critical domains to coexist on one system-on-chip. The ACRN Device Model provides virtual device emulation. The project describes a codebase under 40K lines and reports low latency, fast boot times and responsive hardware communication. ACRN uses the BSD 3-Clause license, offers a command-line management interface and supports nested virtualization. Source code is maintained in a public GitHub repository with online documentation. Community help is available through mailing lists, IRC channels and monthly technical meetings.

GNOME Boxes is a free Linux desktop app for creating and managing local virtual machines, then installing an operating system in them. Its automatic installation list includes CentOS Stream, Debian, Fedora, Microsoft Windows, OpenSUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu. Users can set memory and storage limits, save a VM state as a snapshot, and restore it later. Host integration includes shared clipboard, file drop, and shared folders; USB redirection makes devices plugged into the computer available inside a VM. Guest tools can improve input performance, screen resizing, clipboard sharing, and file transfer. Windows guests use spice-guest-tools, while Linux guests commonly use spice-vdagent. Boxes uses qemu-kvm, libvirt-glib, and spice-gtk to manage virtual machines. Three-dimensional acceleration is available for some supported systems. GNOME recommends processor virtualization extensions, at least 8 GB RAM, and 20 GB free disk space for efficient use. Boxes is for local VMs; GNOME points to Connections for remote machines and displays. The app is free and desktop-only.