innotek VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use.

Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Macintosh, Windows, and Linux hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.

VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on.

VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while innotek ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.

Known issues:
· No support for Host Interface Networking
· No support for Internal Networking
· No support for audio input
· No support for VT-x/AMD-V (rarely required)
· No support for raw disk access
· The numlock emulation isn't implemented yet
· The VirtualBox kernel extension is currently accessible from all user accounts

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:
· USB: improved support for recent Linux hosts
· VMM: fixed guru meditation for PAE guests on non-PAE hosts (AMD-V)
· VMM: fixed guru meditation on Mac OS X hosts when using VT-x
· VMM: allow running up to 1023 VMs on 64-bit hosts (used to be 127)
· VMM: several FreeBSD guest related fixes (bugs #2342, #2341, #2761)
· VMM: fixed guru meditation when installing Suse Enterprise Server 10U2 (VT-x only; bug #3039)
· VMM: fixed guru meditation when booting Novell Netware 4.11 (VT-x only; bug #2898)
· VMM: fixed VERR_ADDRESS_TOO_BIG error on some Mac OS X systems when starting a VM
· VMM: clear MSR_K6_EFER_SVME after probing for AMD-V (bug #3058)
· VMM: fixed guru meditation during Windows 7 boot with more than 2 GB guest RAM (VT-x, nested paging only)
· VMM: fixed hang during OS/2 MCP2 boot (AMD-V and VT-x only)
· VMM: fixed loop during OpenBSD 4.0 boot (VT-x only)
· VMM: fixed random crashes related to FPU/XMM with 64 bits guests on 32 bits hosts
· VMM: fixed occasional XMM state corruption with 64 bits guests
· GUI: raised the RAM limit for new VMs to 75% of the host memory
· GUI: added Windows 7 as operating system type
· VBoxSDL: fixed -fixed fixedmode parameter (bug #3067)
· Clipboard: stability fixes (Linux and Solaris hosts only, bug #2675 and #3003)
· 3D support: fixed VM crashes for certain guest applications (bugs #2781, #2797, #2972, #3089)
· LsiLogic: improved support for Windows guests (still experimental)
· VGA: fixed a 2.1.0 regression where guest screen resize events were not properly handled (bug #2783)
· VGA: significant performance improvements when using VT-x/AMD-V on Mac OS X hosts
· VGA: better handling for VRAM offset changes (fixes GRUB2 and Dos DOOM display issues)
· VGA: custom VESA modes with invalid widths are now rounded up to correct ones (bug #2895)
· IDE: fixed ATAPI passthrough support (Linux hosts only; bug #2795)
· Networking: fixed kernel panics due to NULL pointer dereference in Linux kernels < 2.6.20 (Linux hosts only; bug #2827)
· Networking: fixed intermittend BSODs when using the new host interface (Windows hosts only; bugs #2832, #2937, #2929)
· Networking: fixed several issues with displaying hostif NICs in the GUI (Windows hosts only; bugs 2814, #2842)
· Networking: fixed the issue with displaying hostif NICs without assigned IP addresses (Linux hosts only; bug #2780)
· Networking: fixed the issue with sent packets coming back to internal network when using hostif (Linux hosts only; bug #3056).
· NAT: fixed port forwarding (Windows hosts only; bug #2808)
· NAT: fixed booting from the builtin TFTP server (bug #1959)
· NAT: fixed occasional crashes (bug #2709)
· SATA: vendor product data (VPD) is now configurable
· SATA: raw disk partitions were not recognized (2.1.0 regression, Windows host only, bug #2778)
· SATA: fixed timeouts in the guest when using raw VMDK files (Linux host only, bug #2796)
· SATA: huge speed up during certain I/O operations like formatting a drive
· SATA/IDE: fixed possible crash/errors during VM shutdown
· VRDP: fixed loading of libpam.so.1 from the host (Solaris hosts only)
· VRDP: fixed RDP client disconnects
· VRDP: fixed VRDP server misbehavior after a broken client connection
· VBoxManage showvminfo: fixed assertion for running VMs (bug #2773)
· VBoxManage convertfromraw: added parameter checking and made it default to creating VDI files; fixed and documented format parameter (bug #2776)
· VBoxManage clonehd: fixed garbled output image when creating VDI files (bug #2813)
· VBoxManage guestproperty: fixed property enumeration (incorrect parameters/exception)
· VHD: fixed error when attaching certain container files (bug #2768)
· Solaris hosts: added support for serial ports (bug #1849)
· Solaris hosts: fix for Japanese keyboards (bug #2847)
· Solaris hosts: 32-bit and 64-bit versions now available as a single, unified package
· Linux hosts: don’t depend on libcap1 anymore (bug #2859)
· Linux hosts: compile fixes for 2.6.29-rc1
· Linux hosts: don’t drop any capability if the VM was started by root (2.1.0 regression)
· Mac OS X hosts: save the state of running or paused VMs when the host machine’s battery reaches critical level
· Mac OS X hosts: improved window resizing of the VM window
· Mac OS X hosts: added GUI option to disable the dock icon realtime preview in the GUI to decrease the host CPU load when the guest is doing 3D
· Mac OS X hosts: polished realtime preview dock icon
· Windows Additions: fixed guest property and logging OS type detection for Windows 2008 and Windows 7 Beta
· Windows Additions: added support for Windows 7 Beta (bugs #2995, #3015)
· Windows Additions: fixed Windows 2000 guest freeze when accessing files on shared folders (bug #2764)
· Windows Additions: fixed Ctrl-Alt-Del handling when using VBoxGINA
· Windows Additions Installer: Added /extract switch to only extract (not install) the files to a directory (can be specified with /D=path)
· Linux installer and Additions: added support for the Linux From Scratch distribution (bug #1587) and recent Gentoo versions (bug #2938)
· Additions: added experimental support for X.Org Server 1.6 RC on Linux guests
· Linux Additions: fixed bug which prevented to properly set fmode on mapped shared folders (bug #1776)
· Linux Additions: fixed appending of files on shared folders (bug #1612)
· Linux Additions: ignore noauto option when mounting a shared folder (bug #2498)
· Linux Additions: fixed a driver issue preventing X11 from compiling keymaps (bug #2793 and #2905)
· X11 Additions: workaround in the mouse driver for a server crash when the driver is loaded manually (bug #2397)