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The folks at Sun Microsystems didn’t hesitate all too long to start fiddling around with VirtualBox after their acquisition of its maker innotek about 3 months ago. The company has just released version 1.6.0, and its changelog neatly tracks what’s new.

The following major new features were added:

• Solaris and Mac OS X host support
• Seamless windowing for Linux and Solaris guests
• Guest Additions for Solaris
• A webservice API
• SATA hard disk (AHCI) controller
• Experimental Physical Address Extension (PAE) support

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

• GUI: added accessibility support (508)
• GUI: VM session information dialog
• VBoxHeadless: renamed from VBoxVRDP
• VMM: reduced host CPU load of idle guests
• VMM: many ?xes for VT-x/SVM hardware-supported virtualization
• ATA/IDE: better disk geometry compatibility with VMware images
• ATA/IDE: virtualize an AHCI controller
• Storage: better write optimization, prevent images from growing unnecessarily.
• Network: support PXE booting with NAT
• Network: ?xed the Am79C973 PCNet emulation for Nexenta guests
• NAT: improved builtin DHCP server (implemented DHCPNAK response)
• NAT: port forwarding stopped when restoring the VM from a saved state
• NAT: make subnet con?gurable
• XPCOM: moved to libxml2
• XPCOM: ?xed VBoxSVC autostart race
• Audio: SoundBlaster 16 emulation
• USB: ?xed problems with USB 2.0 devices
• MacOS X: ?xed seamless mode
• MacOS X: better desktop integration, several look’n’feel ?xes
• MacOS X: switched to Quartz2D framebuffer
• MacOS X: added support for shared folders
• MacOS X: added support for clipboard integration
• Solaris: added host audio playback support (experimental)
• Solaris: made it possible to run VirtualBox from non-global zones
• Shared Folders: made them work for NT4 guests
• Shared Folders: many bug?xes to improve stability
• Seamless windows: added support for Linux guests
• Linux installer: support DKMS for compiling the kernel module
• Linux host: compatibility ?xes with Linux 2.6.25
• Windows host: support for USB devices has been signi?cantly improved; many additional USB devices now work
• Windows Additions: automatically install AMD PCNet drivers on Vista guests
• Linux additions: several ?xes, experimental support for RandR 1.2
• Linux additions: compatibility ?xes with Linux 2.6.25

You can download VirtualBox 1.6.0 free of charge here.

[Source: Virtualization.info]