Wednesday, November 11, 2009

VirtualBox 3.1.0 Beta 1 released

VirtualBox 3.1.0 Beta 1 released.

I'm especially interested in "support for OpenSolaris Boomer architecture" which hopefully means a working microphone in a guest on my laptop - that would mean a working Skype on VB/Windows :)

Version 3.1 will be a major update. The following major new features were added:
  • Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one machine to another
  • VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one, and new snapshots can be taken from other snapshots as well (aka branched snapshots)
  • 2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and colour conversion
  • The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running
  • Experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher.
  • Significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal (non-nested) paging)
  • Experimental support for EFI (Extended Firmware Interface)
  • VirtIO network device support

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:
  • VMM: reduced IO-APIC overhead for 32 bits Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 guests; requires 64 bits support (VT-x only; bug #4392)
  • VMM: fixed double timer interrupt delivery on old Linux kernels using IO-APIC (caused guest time to run at double speed; bug #3135)
  • VMM: reinit VT-x and AMD-V after host suspend or hibernate; some BIOSes forget this (Windows hosts only; bug #5421)
  • GUI: prevent starting a VM with a single mouse click (bug #2676)
  • 3D support: major performance improvement in VBO processing
  • 3D support: added GL_EXT_framebuffer_object, GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array support
  • 3D support: fix crashes in FarCry, SecondLife, Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, Eve Online (bugs #2801, #2791)
  • 3D support: fix graphics corruption in World of Warcraft (#2816)
  • iSCSI: support iSCSI targets with more than 2TiB capacity
  • VRDP: fixed occasional VRDP server crash (bug #5424)
  • Network: fixed the E1000 emulation for QNX (and probably other) guests (bug #3206)
  • Network: even if the virtual network cable was disconnected, some guests were able to send / receive packets (E1000; bug #5366)
  • Network: even if the virtual network cable was disconnected, the PCNet card received some spurious packets which might confuse the guest (bug #4496)
  • VMDK: fixed handling of split image variants
  • VHD: fixed incompatibility with Hyper-V
  • OVF: create manifest files on export and verify the content of an optional manifest file on import
  • X11 based hosts: allow the user to specify their own scan code layout (bug #2302)
  • Mac OS X hosts: don't auto show the menu and dock in fullscreen (#bug 4866)
  • Solaris hosts: combined the kernel interface package into the VirtualBox main package
  • Solaris hosts: support for OpenSolaris Boomer architecture (with OSS audio backend).
  • Shared folders: fixed changing case of file names (bug #2520)
  • Shared folders: VBOXSVR is visible in Network folder (bug #4842)
  • Windows and Linux Additions: added balloon tip notifier if VirtualBox host version was updated and Additions are out of date
  • Solaris Additions: fixed as_pagelock() failed errors affecting guest properties (bug #5337)
  • Windows Additions: added automatic logon support for Windows Vista and Windows 7
  • Windows Additions: fix crash in seamless mode (contributed by Huihong Luo)
  • Linux Additions: added support for uninstalling the Linux Guest Additions (bug #4039)
  • SDK: added object-oriented web service bindings for PHP5

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