Software Update: VirtualBox 5.0 Beta 3

Oracle has released the third beta release of version 5.0 of VirtualBox. VirtualBox can be used to install other operating systems in a virtual environment on a computer. In this way it is possible to use different operating systems on the same hardware side by side and at the same time. VirtualBox is available for Windows XP and above, OS X, Linux, and Solaris, and is capable of many guest operating systems to turn.

Version 5.0 of VirtualBox includes support for para-virtualization under Windows and Linux, which should bring performance improvements. Furthermore, more instruction sets from modern processors are supported, there is drag&drop to and from virtual machines and disk images can now be encrypted. Below is the changelog so far.

VirtualBox 5.0 Beta 3:

• VMM: XSAVE, AVX and AVX-2 are now exposed to the guest (bug #11347†
• VMM: fixed a Guru Meditation when rebooting certain guests (for example Solaris doing fast reboot) by fixing the implementation for INIT IPI)
• GUI: Encryption progress reflection (see here†
• GUI: Encryption errors handling (see here†
• GUI: Properly disable unavailable menu actions (see here†
• GUI: properly report errors when trying to save the VM settings instead of dead-locking (see here†
• API: allow to hotplug SATA optical devices (see here†
• VRDP: fixed listening for IPv6 on some systems (bug #14038†
• USB: fixed attaching of high speed USB devices if xHCI is not present (they always ended up on the OHCI controller)
• Audio: improved volume control
• Audio: fixed SB16 playback
• Drag and drop: Transfers can be canceled properly, bug fixes
• Guest Control: Major overhaul, for example fixing wrong parameter quoting (bug #13157†
• Shared Folders: fixed a crash when removing (in some cases also when creating) a shared folder when the VM is running (see here†
• OVA: fixed importing of appliances without attached hard disks (see here†
• Snapshots: fixed a bug in handling a saved state when taking an offline snapshot
• Snapshots: fixed a sporadic bug when restoring a snapshot which left unused diff images behind
• VirtualKD: re-added device which was omitted by accident (see here†
• Windows hosts: more hardening fixes (eg bugs #14051† #14052†
• Additions/X.Org: fixed guest-to-host mouse mapping for Solaris and Linux Mint/Ubuntu 12.04.0 guests.
• Additions/X.Org: fixed resizing problem in openSUSE 10.3 and guests of a similar generation (see here†
• documented the Guest Additions heartbeat service

VirtualBox 5.0 Beta 2:

• VMM: added support for using paravirtualization providers with raw-mode VMs
• GUI: encryption passwords no more centered (see here†
• GUI: canceling encryption password prompt at VM startup proposing to close VM (see here†
• GUI: Enter/Return key press for the last (or single) entry of the encryption password prompt accepts the dialog (see here†
• GUI: VM menu-bar contents reordering – moving some of unusual for the Help menu stuff into separate File menu (see here†
• GUI: scaling support will use the old smooth mechanism for the software renderer case (see here†
• GUI: optimized medium enumeration for the large differencing trees
• GUI: USB controller types for the given VM are now reflected in VM details pane
• GUI: avoid error message during shutdown of a separate VM (see here†
• GUI: fixed a rare crash when starting VM in separate mode
• Drag and drop: fixed a crash when copying over host elements to the guest
• Audio: don’t crash when attaching via RDP to a VM with disabled audio (see here†
• Input: fixed vertical scrolling and buttons 4/5 in PS/2 !ImEx protocol (see here†
• 3D: fix crash on restoring state on X11 hosts (bug #12737†
• Bridged Networking: avoid host networking stack pause/restart on VM start/stop/pause (Windows hosts only; see here†
• API: fixed long-standing issue (Windows host only) which caused loss of error information for the VM start operation
• API: fixed too strict condition for changing extradata settings of newly created VMs (see here†
• API: fixed too strict condition for creating persistent shared folders (see here†
• rdesktop-vrdp: upgraded to version 1.8.3
• BIOS: fix for booting from SCSI CD/DVD media (see here†
• BIOS: fix for reads partially beyond end of disk (bug 14021†
• Windows Additions/WDDM: improved video memory utilization and allow more/bigger guest screens with large resolutions (including HiDPI)
• Linux Additions: fix for Linux guest kernels < 2.6.13 (eg RHEL4; see here†
• Added serial port forwarding over TCP socket

VirtualBox 5.0 Beta 1:

• Paravirtualization support for Windows and Linux guests to improve time-keeping accuracy and performance
• Make more instruction set extensions available to the guest when running with hardware-assisted virtualization and nested paging. Among others this includes: SSE 4.1, SSE4.2, AES-NI, POPCNT, RDRAND and RDSEED
• xHCI Controller to support USB 3 devices (requires the Extension Pack)
• Drag and drop support (bidirectional) for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests
• Disk image encryption (requires the Extension Pack)
• GUI: Detach mode: Terminate the GUI but keep the VM running and re-attach to a running VM process (see here†
• GUI: VM guest-content scaling support (including 3D acceleration)
• GUI: New User Interface settings page for customizing status-bar, menu-bar and guest-content scaling
• GUI: New Encryption settings tab for customizing encryption options for disk images
• GUI: HiDPI support including application icons and optional unscaled HiDPI output on Mac OS X (including 3D acceleration)
• GUI: Hotplugging support for SATA disks
• New, modular audio architecture for providing a better abstraction of the host audio backends
• USB hard disks
• Support for the NDIS6 networking framework on Windows (default on Vista and later)
• VMM: improved timing on Solaris hosts with older VT-x hosts without preemption timers
• VBoxManage: when exporting an appliance, support the suppression of MAC addresses, which means they will be always recreated on import, avoiding duplicate MAC addresses for VMs which are imported several times
• USB: added USB traffic capturing
• Made resizing X11 guests work more reliably
• API: block the removal of the current snapshot if it has child snapshots (only relevant for VMs without snapshottable hard disks, their presence always prevented removal), which resulted in VM config corruption
• API: mark VM configs with snapshots but without current snapshot as inaccessible, as this combination is nonsense
• API: fix information for some automatically generated events (only with XPCOM, Windows host was not affected), which caused errors when getting some of the attributes over the webservice (bug #12379†
• API: fix crashes in Java API clients using the XPCOM binding, happened with output parameters only (bug #11232†
• API: a number of settings (eg network settings) can now also be changed when the VM is in saved state