Oracle VM VirtualBox

Oracle VirtualBox (formerly Sun VirtualBox, innotek VirtualBox and Sun xVM VirtualBox) is a free and cross-platform virtualization application that provides a family of powerful x86 virtualization tools designed for desktop, server and embedded use. VirtualBox can be used on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows platforms to run virtual machines of any of the aforementioned operating systems, as well as any BSD distribution, IMB OS/2 flavors, DOS, Netware, L4, QNX, and JRockitVE.

It's portable

Oracle VirtualBox is portable, requires no hardware virtualization, includes guest additions and great hardware support. It also features USB device support, full ACPI support, multiscreen resolutions, and built-in iSCSI support. Support for PXE network boot, multi-generation branched snapshots, remote machine display, extensible RDP authentication, and USB over RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) is also integrated in Oracle VirtualBox.

Supports 32-bit and 64-bit architectures

At the moment, the program is capable of running only AMD64/Intel64 and x86 architectures. By default, when creating a new virtual machine, you will be able to select the operating system that you plan on virtualizing. Ever since Oracle acquired the Sun Microsystems company, VirtualBox is actively developed by a team of professional engineers who implement new features and functionality with every release.

Virtual machines can be highly customized

Once a new virtual machine has been created in VirtualBox, users will be able to change its type, version, boot order, chipset, pointing device, base memory (RAM), processors, video memory, monitor count, audio driver and controller, network adapters, serial and USB ports, and storage devices. When talking about storage devices supported by VirtualBox, we can mention that you will be able use a virtual CD/DVD image file (also known as ISO image) or use the host CD/DVD drive for running the virtualized OS.

The most sophisticated and powerful virtualization software

Support for USB devices is also a controversial feature of this application, because you will need to do some tweaking before it will work as intended. But all in all, this is one of the most sophisticated and powerful virtualization software for Linux operating systems.

What is new in this release:

• GUI: mouse events did not reach host windows behind the transparent VM window (Mac OS X hosts only; bug #16246)
• Audio: fixed accidental crashes when using the AC'97 sound emulation (bug #16959)
• Audio: fixed crash when default input or output devices have changed (bugs #16968, #16969, #17004)
• Audio: fixed recording when using the ALSA backend
• Audio: fixed handle leak when using the OSS backend
• E1000: fixed a crash related to VLAN traffic over internal network (5.1.26 regression; bug #16960)
• NAT: apply --natbindip1 to TCP connections (bug #16478)
• OVF: when importing an appliance with XHCI controller, don't add an OHCI controller.
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed a GUI crash if Spotlight is used from file dialogs (5.1.20 regression; bugs #16935, #16953)
• Linux hosts: fixed creating fixed sized VDI images (bug #17010)
• Linux hosts / guests: fixes for Linux 4.4 of openSUSE Leap 42.3 (bug #16966)
• Bridged networking: align outgoing packet at word boundary, preventing Windows host crash in MsLbfoProvider.
• Linux Additions: kernel drm driver support for custom EL7 Linux 3.10 kernel
• Solaris Additions: hide an informational message on the bootup console

What is new in version 5.1.8:

• GUI: fixed keyboard shortcut handling regressions (Mac OS X hosts only; bugs #15937 and #15938)
• GUI: fixed keyboard handling regression for separate UI (Windows hosts only; bugs #15928)
• NAT: don't exceed the maximum number of "search" suffixes. Patch from bug #15948.
• NAT: fixed parsing of port-forwarding rules with a name which contains a slash (bug #16002)
• NAT Network: when the host has only loopback nameserver that cannot be mapped to the guests (e.g. dnsmasq running on 127.0.1.1), make DHCP supply NAT Network DNS proxy as nameserver.
• Bridged Network: prevent flooding syslog with packet allocation error messages (bug #15569)
• Audio: now using Audio Queues on Mac OS X hosts
• Audio: fixed recording with the PulseAudio backend (5.1 regression)
• Audio: various bugfixes
• Snapshots: fixed regression in 5.1.4 for deleting snapshots with several disks (bug #15831)
• Snapshots: crash fix and better error reporting when snapshot deletion failed
• Storage: some fixes for the NVMe emulation with Windows guests
• API: fixed initialization of SAS controllers (bug #15972)
• Build system: make it possible to build VBox on systems which default to Python 3
• Windows hosts: detect certain cases of REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG errors and print a helpful error message
• Windows hosts: adapted to changes in Windows 10 build 14901 (bug #15944)
• Windows hosts: better support for processor groups on Windows 7 and later which is required on certain hosts with many CPUs
• Windows installer / Additions: added option to prevent creating of start menu items (bug #15922)
• Windows Additions / VGA: if the guest's power management turns a virtual screen off, blank the corresponding VM window rather than hide the window
• Windows Additions: fixed a generic bug which could lead to freezing shared folders (bug #15662)
• Linux hosts / guests: fix for kernels with CONFIG_CPUMASK_OFFSTACK set (bug #16020)
• Linux Additions: don't require all virtual consoles be in text mode. This should fix cases when the guest is booted with a graphical boot screen (bug #15683)
• Linux Additions: added depmod overrides for the vboxguest and vboxsf kernel modules to fix conflicts with modules shipped by certain Linux distributions
• X11 Additions: disable 3D on the guest if the host does not provide enough capabilities (bug #15860)

What is new in version 5.1.6:

• GUI: fixed issue with opening '.vbox' files and it's aliases
• GUI: keyboard grabbing fixes (bugs #15771 and #15745)
• GUI: fix for passing through Ctrl + mouse-click (Mac OS X hosts only; bug #15714)
• GUI: fixed automatic deletion of extension pack files (bugs #11352 and #14742)
• USB: fixed showing unknown device instead of the manufacturer or product description under certain circumstances (5.1.0 regression; bug #15764)
• XHCI: another fix for a hanging guest under certain conditions as result of the fix for bug #15747, this time for Windows 7 guests
• Serial: fixed high CPU usage with certain USB to serial converters on Linux hosts (bug #7796)
• Storage: fixed attaching stream optimized VMDK images (bug #14764)
• Storage: reject image variants which are unsupported by the backend (bug #7227)
• Storage: fixed loading saved states created with VirtualBox 5.0.10 and older when using a SCSI controller (bug #15865)
• Storage: fixed broken NVMe emulation if the host I/O cache setting is enabled
• Storage: fixed using multiple NVMe controllers if ICH9 is used
• NVMe: fixed a crash during reset which could happen under certain circumstances
• Audio: fixed microphone input (5.1.2 regression; bugs #14386 and #15802)
• Audio: fixed crashes under certain conditions (5.1.0 regression; bug #15887 and others)
• Audio: fixed recording with the ALSA backend (5.1 regression)
• Audio: fixed stream access mode with OSS backend (5.1 regression, thanks to Jung-uk Kim)
• E1000: do also return masked bits when reading the ICR register, this fixes booting from iPXE (5.1.2 regression; bug #15846)
• BIOS: fixed 4bpp scanline calculation (bug #15787)
• API: relax the check for the version attribute in OVF/OVA appliances (bug #15856)
• Windows hosts: fixed crashes when terminating the VM selector or other VBox COM clients (bug #15726 and others)
• Linux Installer: fixed path to the documentation in .rpm packages (5.1.0 regression)
• Linux Installer: fixed the vboxdrv.sh script to prevent an SELinux complaint (bug #15816)
• Linux hosts: don't use 32-bit legacy capabilities
• Linux Additions: Linux 4.8 fix for the kernel display driver (bugs #15890 and #15896)
• Linux Additions: don't load the kernel modules provided by the Linux distribution but load the kernel modules from the official Guest Additions package instead (bug #15324)
• Linux Additions: fix dynamic resizing problems in recent Linux guests (bug #15875)
• User Manual: fixed error in the VBoxManage chapter for the getextradata enumerate example (bug #15862)

What is new in version 5.1.4:

• GUI: show actual VM uptime in the session information window
• Audio: re-enabled speakers for Mac OS X guests (5.1.0 regression; bug #15611)
• Audio: fixed crashes under certain conditions
• USB: fixed a hang under certain conditions
• USB: fixed a hanging guest under certain conditions (bug #15747)
• PIIX4: implemented dummy SMBus controller to prevent annoying Linux kernel warnings about uninitialized SMBus base address (bug #9517)
• NVMe: several fixes to improve stability, fixed a crash while saving a VM state
• VMDK: Fixed an issue creating fixed size images with certain sizes and the Split2G option enabled (bug #15748)
• VHDX: fixed cloning images with VBoxManage clonehd (bug #14288)
• Storage: Fixed broken bandwidth limitation when the limit is very low (bug #14982)
• EFI: fixed sending debug messages in the EFI firmware if a serial port is enabled (bug #12161)
• OVF: when importing appliances, make sure that the version of the embedded VirtualBox-specific settings is processed, to get the default settings handling right
• VBoxManage: Don't try to set the medium type if there is no change (bug #13850)
• Linux installer: fixed some scripting issues (bugs #15701 and #15702)
• Linux installer: fixed a path issue on certain Linux distributions (bug #15717)
• Windows hosts: fixed corrupted mouse pointers with some Linux and Solaris guests (bug #15665)
• Linux Additions: made the video driver work on 32-bit guests with large video memory sizes (bug #15621)
• Linux Additions: made the video driver work on kernel 4.7 and later (bug #15769)
• Linux Additions: converted a failure message to an informational one when drivers could not be stopped during upgrade (bug #15692)
• Linux Additions: made the video driver work around an X server bug which cause screen refresh to stop (bug #15511)
• Windows Additions: auto-resizing fixes for Windows 10 guests (bug #15257)
• Windows Additions: fixed VBoxTray problems with Windows 2000 (bug #15661)

What is new in version 5.1.2:

• VMM: several fixes
• GUI: fixed screenshot if the VM is started in separate mode
• GUI: fixed issue with double-click/opening registered file types (.vbox and .vbox-extpack) on Mac OS X (bug #15648)
• GUI: fixed a bug which made it impossible close some error/warning messages using the close button
• GUI: weakened the control over the VM window behavior allowing to resize it across multiple screens and to use in Snap Assist techniques
• GUI: jump to the second tab of the session information window (5.1.0 regression)
• GUI: fix for Alt-Tab
• Storage: fixed creating fixed size VHD images (bug #15601)
• Storage: fixed a hang during power off if the VM was suspended before and a NVMe controller is configured
• USB: fixed a crash under certain conditions
• Audio: make AC'97 volume control work again (5.1.0 regression; bug #15598)
• Audio: fixed rare VM hangs when using AC'97 emulation
• Audio: SB16 fixes
• EFI: fixed access to devices attached to SATA port 2 and higher (bug #15607)
• OVA: fix for checking certain signatures
• OVA: fixed MAC address generation for appliances created by VirtualBox (5.1.0 regression; bug #15623)
• API: fixed audio settings handling for older config files (bug #15626)
• API: fixed truncation of USB product/vendor IDs on Linux hosts (5.1.0 regression; bug #15644)
• API: fixed VRDP with authentication (bug #15653)
• API: don't crash if there is no graphics controller configured (bug #15628)
• Linux hosts: fixed EL5 builds (bug #15634)
• non-Windows hosts: fixed a crash during shutdown under rare circumstances (bug #15568)
• Linux Additions: fixed SELinux issue which prevented certain Linux guests to work in 3D mode (bug #15574)
• User Manual: updates

What is new in version 5.1.0:

• Improved Performance: Significantly improved performance for multi-CPU virtual machines and networking.
• Bug Reporting Tool: New utility able to collect all the information and logs related to the host and guest operating system, for debug or analysis purposes.
• Improved Logging Window: New logging functionalities to highlight and filter information related to guest Virtual Machines.
• Improved multimedia availability: Improved support for different USB devices and multi-channel audio availability.
• Flash storage emulation: New NVMHCI storage controller emulation available, able to emulate NVME devices - Flash storage - on guest Virtual Machine.
• Improved Linux integration: Automatic modules deployment in case of a Linux Kernel upgrade and improved systemd integration for the latest releases of popular Linux distributions.

Requirements:

• You will need to install some additional libraries on your Linux system in order to run VirtualBox - in particular, you will need libxalan-c, libxerces-c and version 5 of libstdc . How to install these will depend on the Linux distribution you are using.