Oracle heeft de zesde update van versie 4.2 van VirtualBox uitgebracht, maar de website is wegens technische problemen al een tijdje slecht bereikbaar. VirtualBox kan worden gebruikt om andere besturingssystemen in een virtuele omgeving op een computer te installeren. Op die manier is het mogelijk om verschillende besturingssystemen op dezelfde hardware naast elkaar en tegelijkertijd te gebruiken. VirtualBox is beschikbaar voor Windows XP en hoger, OS X, Linux en Solaris, en is in staat om een groot aantal gastbesturingssystemen te draaien.
Versie 4.2 van VirtualBox brengt onder andere verbeterde ondersteuning voor Windows 8. Verder kunnen nu onder Linux, Solaris en OS X virtuele machines al tijdens het booten van de computer worden gestart en kunnen er bestanden naar Linux-hosts worden gekopieerd door middel van drag&drop. In versie 4.2.12 zijn verder nog de volgende veranderingen en verbeteringen aangebracht:
The following items were fixed and/or added:
- VMM: fixed a Guru Meditation on putting Linux guest CPU online if nested paging is disabled
- VMM: invalidate TLB entries even for non-present pages
- GUI: Multi-screen support: fixed a crash on visual-mode change
- GUI: Multi-screen support: disabled guest-screens should now remain disabled on visual-mode change
- GUI: Multi-screen support: handle host/guest screen plugging/unplugging in different visual-modes
- GUI: Multi-screen support: seamless mode: fixed a bug when empty seamless screens were represented by fullscreen windows
- GUI: Multi-screen support: each machine window in multi-screen configuration should have correct menu-bar now (Mac OS X hosts)
- GUI: Multi-screen support: machine window View menu should have correct content in seamless/fullscreen mode now (Mac OS X hosts)
- GUI: VM manager: vertical scroll-bars should be now updated on content/window resize
- GUI: VM settings: fixed crash on machine state-change event
- GUI: don't show warnings about enabled or disabled mouse integration if the VM was restored from a saved state
- Virtio-net: properly announce that the guest has to handle partial TCP checksums (bug #9380)
- Storage: Fixed incorrect alignment of VDI images causing disk size changes when using snapshots (bug #11597)
- Audio: fixed broken ALSA & PulseAudio on some Linux hosts due to invalid symbol resolution (bug #11615)
- PS/2 keyboard: re-apply keyboard repeat delay and rate after a VM was restored from a saved state (bug #10933)
- BIOS: updated DMI processor information table (type 4): corrected L1 & L2 cache table handles
- Timekeeping: fix several issues which can lead to incorrect time, Solaris guests sporadically showed time going briefly back to Jan 1 1970
- Main/Metrics: disk metrics are collected properly when software RAID, symbolic links or rootfs are used on Linux hosts
- VBoxManage: don't stay paused after a snapshot was created and the VM was running before
- VBoxManage: introduced controlvm nicpromisc (bug #11423)
- VBoxManage: don't crash on controlvm guestmemoryballoon if the VM isn't running (bug #11639)
- VBoxHeadless: don't filter guest property events as this would affect all clients (bug #11644)
- Guest control: prevent double CR in the output generated by guest commands and do NLS conversion
- Linux hosts / guests: fixed build errors on Linux 3.5 and newer kernels if the CONFIG_UIDGID_STRICT_TYPE_CHECKS config option is enabled (bug #11664)
- Linux Additions: handle fall-back to VESA driver on RedHat-based guests if vboxvideo cannot be loaded
- Linux Additions: RHEL/OEL/CentOS 6.4 compile fix (bug #11586)
- Linux Additions: Debian Linux kernel 3.2.0-4 (3.2.39) compile fix (bug #11634)
- Linux Additions: added auto-logon support for Linux guests using LightDM as the display manager
- Windows Additions: Support for multimonitor. Dynamic enable/disable of secondary virtual monitors. Support for XPDM/WDDM based guests
- X11 Additions: support X.Org Server 1.14 (bug #11609)