Software Update: VirtualBox 5.0 RC 2

Oracle has released the second release candidate of VirtualBox version 5.0. 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. The main improvements made in this release can be found below.

Incomplete list of changes since VirtualBox 5.0 RC 1:

• VMM: fixed a GP in SUPR0QueryVTCaps(see here)
• VMM: fixed a raw mode bug (5.0.0 RC1 regression)
• xHCI: fixed resuming from a saved state (see here)
• AHCI: fixed a crash under certain conditions during VM poweroff
• USB: improve playback with USB sound devices attached to the emulated OHCI controller
• Audio: provide Linux guests a different AC97 audio codec type so Linux ALSA doesn’t mis-detect the link speed (default for new VMs)
• Drag and drop: enabled guest to host support for OS X hosts
• Drag and drop: fixed freezes and crashes in some error cases
• API: OS type description consistency fix (bug #14162)
• API: fixed a check which prevented changing the network promiscuous mode at runtime
• API: don’t keep OVA files open after import
• API: don’t resume a VM on host-resume unless it was previously paused due to a host-suspend (see here)
• API: don’t lose the saved state and “current state changed” flag during cloning of a VM
• ExtPack: don’t fail if the TMP directory contains non-latin1 characters (bug #14159)
• Mac OS X hosts: don’t crash when upgrading from VBox 4.3.28 which has a bug in handling the CR4.VMXE bit
• Solaris hosts: Solaris 12 installer fix
• X11 Additions: fixed wrong DPI value (bug #14151)