Oracle heeft de eerste bètarelease van versie 4.3 van VirtualBox uitgebracht. 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.
In versie 4.3 van VirtualBox is onder meer de complete virtualisatiecode herschreven, wat diverse problemen heeft verholpen en ook diverse prestatieverbeteringen laat zien. Verder is er videocapturing en ondersteuning voor ipv6, en kunnen diverse virtuele machines die op dezelfde computer draaien, nu via het interne netwerk met elkaar communiceren. Het volledige changelog van deze release staat hieronder.
This is a major update. The following major new features were added:In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:
- VMM: major rewrite of the VT-x code including many bug fixes and performance improvements (for example bug #9659)
- GUI: keyboard shortcuts management (input page of global preferences extended with possibility to edit general keyboard shortcuts for VirtualBox Manager and Virtual Machine)
- GUI: extended messaging mechanism (new non-modal popup overlays used to show noncritical warnings and provide user with additional information)
- GUI: video capturing support (bug #4766)
- GUI: host touch devices support (GUI passes host touch-events to guest)
- Emulated USB touch devices
- VRDP: support for IPv6
- NAT: experimental virtual router mode: several VMs are attached to the same internal network and share one NAT service (see chapter 6.4, Network Address Translation Service (experimental), page 95)
- VMM: properly handle NMIs on Linux hosts with X2APIC enabled
- GUI: update check uses https
- GUI: lot of internal stuff rewritten (cleanup and bug-fixes)
- Settings: global and per-VM default frontend configuration, useful to select the use of alternative VM frontends
- Settings: limit depth of snapshot tree to 250 levels, as more will lead to decreased performance and may trigger crashes
- Main: new event queue implementation which does not use the host’s native event queue for processing VirtualBox events anymore
- Main: use the XDG standard configuration folder instead of .VirtualBox on systems where it is appropriate (bug #5099)
- VBoxManage: list more information about hard disk/DVD/floppy media, and support the --long option to show really all available details
- VBoxManage: added support for optional command line parameters for the automatic Guest Additions update
- VBoxManage: added support for listing active guest sessions, guest processes and/or guest files via guestcontrol list <all|sessions|processes|files>
- VBoxManage: added support for closing active guest sessions via guestcontrol session close --session-id| --session-name|--all
- VBoxManage: added support for terminating active guest processes via guestcontrol process kill|close|terminate --session-id| --session-name ... or guestcontrol [p[s]]kill --session-id| --session-name ...
- VBoxManage: added support for watching guest sessions via guestcontrol watch
- 3D support: several fixes
- 3D support: several fixes for Mac OS X hosts
- OVF: several fixes
- Keyboard: fix for reporting key sequences like Ctrl+Alt+Del for the USB keyboard emulation
- Shared Clipboard/X11: support for BMP-format images, contributed by François Revol
- Windows hosts: don’t cause massive DPC latency (bug #6242)
- Windows hosts: consider symlinks when retrieving volume information (bug #11962)
- Windows Additions: fixed misbehavior with guest display power management (WDDM driver only; bug #11170)
- Windows guests: ability to track guest user idle times through the newly introduced event IGuestUserStateChangedEvent