VirtualBox 5.0 Now In Beta

[Opcode]

Source

 

5.0

 

VirtualBox 5.0 will be a new major release. Here is an incomplete list of changes since VirtualBox 5.0 Beta 1:

• 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 (e.g. RHEL4; see here)
• Added serial port forwarding via TCP socket

 

VirtualBox 5.0 will be a new major release. Here is an incomplete list of changes:

• 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
• Drag'n drop support (bidirectional) for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests
• Disk image encryption
• 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

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

• 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
• 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 (e.g. network settings) can now also be changed when the VM is in saved state

 

You can download the Beta 2 binaries here.

 

The beta alone is a pretty hefty improvement over 4.x. It's nice to see new instruction support being added which will in turn improve guest performance.

[Geekazoid]

I never liked VirtualBox, twas too slow compared to the competition.

[Ashaira]

question is when the hell are they going to properly emulate the graphics card so more intensive graphics applications can run properly.

[lak]

Migrated over to Hyper-V and I'm liking it - VMs feel much snappier. However, Hyper-V doesn't exactly win the feature parity contest, when compared with the likes fo VMware.

 

I used VirtualBox in the infant days and it was ok, I'm sure it has matured a lot since then.

[UnknownEngineer]

VMware player works much better for me, it actually doesn't complain about me missing an instruction set when I have it, and it doesn't just stop functioning after a while.

 

That is what happened to me at school, the application just stopped starting up, and it gave an error every time. The only option was to reinstall, the whole OS if I recall correctly. We had 8 or so PC's, all running the same hardware, hardware that was essentially built for Vbox. And still the application just stopped functioning after a few weeks of work. It happened to 4 PC's if I recall correctly.

[SIGSEGV]

YEEEEEES! I love VirtualBox, sure it's not the fastest or best, but screw it, it's free!

[PortentousLad]

proper drag and drop support that has eluded the software for so long.

How cute. I'm currently working with hyper-v, because MS server basically.

It has it's perks sure but the faults are pretty overwhelming...

"drag'n'drop" hahaha.

Anywho I saw they had an update, I'll check it out. Thanks for the news.

[bcredeur97]

YEEEEEES! I love VirtualBox, sure it's not the fastest or best, but screw it, it's free!

VMware player is free and has a comparable amount of features.

But virtualbox is certainly good enough for most tasks imo.

[Opcode]

VirtualBox Beta 2 was released, added new information to OP.