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]
