InnoTek VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software.
Some of the features of VirtualBox are:
- Modularity. VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a virtual machine in a typical virtual machine GUI and then control that machine from the command line, or possibly remotely. VirtualBox also comes with a full Software
Development Kit: even though it is Open Source Software, you don´t have to hack the source to write a new interface for VirtualBox. - Virtual machine descriptions in XML. The configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines. Virtual machine definitions can therefore easily be ported to other computers.
- Guest Additions for Windows and Linux. VirtualBox has special software that can be installed inside Windows and
Linux virtual machines to improve performance and make integration much more seamless. Among the features provided by these Guest Additions are mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest window).
- GUI: don’t crash if a removable host drive referenced from the VM settings vanished
- GUI: ?xed a crash when using the KDE4 Oxygen theme and clicked on the settings button (4.0 regression; bug #7875)
- GUI: properly warn if the machine folder cannot be created (bug #8031)
- GUI: several ?xes for multimonitor X11 guests
- ExtPack: don’t make the installer helper application suid root Linux .deb/.rpm packages only)
- ExtPack: improved user experience on Vista / Windows 7 when installing an extension pack
- ExtPack: ?xed issue with non-ascii characters in the path name during installing an extension pack (bug #9717)
- ExtPack: ?xed SELinux issues on 32-bit Linux hosts
- VBoxManage: Host-only interface creation and removal is now supported for all platforms except Solaris (bug #7741)
- VBoxManage: ?xed segmentation fault when removing non-existent host-only interface
- Storage: ?xed possible crashes with VMDK/VHD images with snapshots and async I/O (4.0 regression)
- Storage: don’t eject the physical medium if a DVD/CDROM/?oppy drive is detached from a VM (bug #5825)
- Storage: be more robust when a faulty guest sends ATA commands to an ATAPI device (bug #6597)
- Parallels: ?xed deletion of the image during suspend, pause or power off (4.0 regression)
- Bridged networking: ?xed host kernel panic when bridging to devices with no TX queue (4.0 regression; Linux hosts only; bug #7908)
- NAT: port-forwarding rule registration respects protocol parameter (bug #8094)
- E1000: ?xed PXE boot issues with WDS (bug #6330)
- Virtio-net: ?xed the issue with TX performance in some Linux guests
- ICH9: ?xed VM crash (software virtualization only; bug #7885)
- VGA: ?xed VESA screen issue (4.0 regression; bug #7986)
- Shared Folders: ?xed parameter parsing when creating symbolic links, ?xes 32-bit/64-bit bitness issue (bug #818)
- Main: ?xed crash under rare circumstances due to an invalid logging string (4.0 regression)
- Main: improve error information propagation for errors preventing a VM start
- Main: ?xed problems with snapshots and non-ASCII characters in machine paths (bug#8024)
- Webservice: now listens to localhost by default as documented (bug #6067)
- Settings: do not fail loading machine settings if removeable drive attachment (host drive or image) cannot be found; with 4.0 this is much more likely when machines are moved from one host to another
- Settings: ?xed issue that changing a snapshot name or description was not saved to machine XML
- OVF/OVA: ?xed import of ?les created by other OVF tools (bug #7983) rdesktop-vrdp: ?x a crash during USB device enumeration (bug #7981)
- Linux hosts: ?xed a crash during USB device enumeration.
- Linux hosts: try a bit harder to allocate memory (bug #8035; 4.0 regression)
- Guest Additions: ?xed parsing of parameters for guest control in VBoxService (4.0 regression; bug #8010)
- Windows Guest Additions: automatic logon on Windows Vista/Windows 7 now supports unlocking previously locked workstations
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