crosvm vs GNOME Boxes

crosvm is a free, open-source virtual machine monitor written in Rust for running Linux and Android guest systems in sandboxed environments. Developed for ChromeOS, it is also used in TerminalApp on Android, Cuttlefish, and Windows. Each virtual device runs in its own Minijail sandbox by default, with syscall policies, namespaces, seccomp filters, and dropped capabilities contributing to isolation. Supported CPU architectures are x86_64, aarch64, and riscv64. The project lists KVM, Gunyah, GenieZone, and Halla for Linux or Android, and WHPX and HAXM for Windows. Virtio devices cover networking, storage, GPU, audio, filesystems, console, RNG, ballooning, vsock, TPM, and video. Block storage supports raw, qcow2, zstd, and Android sparse formats. Linux hosts need kernel 4.14 or newer with KVM support; some devices have additional host requirements. The project documents obtaining crosvm from its source repository and building it with Cargo. SCSI, video, shared host directories via virtio-pmem, and snapshotting are marked experimental or highly experimental.

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.