innotek VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use.

Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Macintosh, Windows, and Linux hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.

VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on.

VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while innotek ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.

Known issues:

· No support for Host Interface Networking
· No support for Internal Networking
· No support for audio input
· No support for VT-x/AMD-V (rarely required)
· No support for raw disk access
· The numlock emulation isn't implemented yet
· The VirtualBox kernel extension is currently accessible from all user accounts

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· VMM: fixed inability to run more than one VM in parallel (AMD-V on CPUs with erratum 170 only; bug #2167)
· VMM: VT-x stability fixes (bug #2179 and others)
· VMM: fixed Linux 2.6.26+ kernel crashes (used by Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha, Fedora 10 Alpha; bug #1875)
· VMM: fixed 64 bits Linux 2.6.26 kernel crashes (Debian)
· VMM: fixed Vista (32 bits) guest crash during boot when PAE and NX are enabled (applied to 64 bits hosts with VT-x enabled only)
· VMM: fixed OS/2 guest crashes during boot (AMD-V; bug #2132)
· GUI: fixed crash when trying to release an inaccessible image in the virtual disk manager
· GUI: fixed invalid error message for a changed snapshot path even if that path wasn't changed (bug #2064)
· GUI: fixed crash when creating a new hard disk image (bug #2060)
· GUI: fixed crash when adding a hard disk in the VM settings (bug #2081)
· GUI: fixed a bug where VirtualBox isn't working with the new QGtkStyle plugin (bug #2066)
· GUI: fixed VM close dialog in seamless mode (Mac OS X hosts only; bug #2067)
· GUI: fixed standard menu entries for NLS versions (Mac OS X hosts only)
· GUI: disable the VT-x/AMD-V setting when it's not supported by the CPU (or on Mac OS X hosts)
· VBoxManage: fixed crash during internalcommands createrawvmdk (bug #2184)
· VBoxManage: fixed output of snapshot showvminfo (bug #698)
· Guest properties: added information about guest network interfaces (Windows guests only)
· Shared Folders: fixed regression that caused Windows guest crashes (bug #2055)
· API: fixed number of installed CPUs (Solaris hosts only)
· VRDP: allow a client to reconnect to an existing session on the VRDP server by dropping the existing connection (configurable and disabled by default; only relevant when multiconnection mode is disabled)
· VRDP: fixed an image repaint problem
· Linux hosts: fixed bug in vboxdrv.ko that could corrupt kernel memory and panic the kernel (bug #2078)
· Linux hosts: compile fixes for kernel module on Linux 2.6.27
· Mac OS X hosts: added Python support
· Additions: fixed a possible hang in HGCM communication after a VM reboot
· Windows additions: added support for Windows XP 64 bits (bug #2117)
· Linux additions: deactivate dynamic resizing on Linux guests with buggy X servers
· Linux additions: support Ubuntu 8.10 guests and Fedora 9 guests (dynamic resizing disabled for the latter) (bug #1854)
· Linux additions: added installer check for the system architecture
· Linux additions: fixed Xorg modules path for some Linux distributions (bug #2128)
· VMDK: be more liberal with ambiguous parts of the format specification and accept more format variants (bug #2062)
· VHD: fixed a bug in the VHD backend which resulted in reading the wrong data (bug #2085)
· Solaris hosts: fixed kernel panic on certain machines when starting VMs with host interface networking (bug #2183)
· Solaris hosts: fixed inability to access NFS shares on the host when host interface networking was enabled
· Solaris hosts: installer now detects and reports when installing under the wrong architecture
· Solaris hosts: fixed security hardening that prevented starting VMs from non-global zones even as root (bug #1948)
· Solaris additions: combined the 32 bit and 64 bit additions installer into a single package
· Mac OS X hosts: experimental support for attaching a real serial port to the guest