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]