VirtualBox is a powerful x86 virtualization product 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). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction.
Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, 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 Sun ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.
Some of the features of VirtualBox are:
• Modularity. VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a virtual machine in a typical virtual machine GUI and then control that machine from the command line, or possibly remotely. VirtualBox also comes with a full Software Development Kit: even though it is Open Source Software, you don't have to hack the source to write a new interface for VirtualBox.
• Virtual machine descriptions in XML. The configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines. Virtual machine definitions can therefore easily be ported to other computers.
• Guest Additions for Windows and Linux. VirtualBox has special software that can be installed inside Windows and Linux virtual machines to improve performance and make integration much more seamless. Among the features provided by these Guest Additions are mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest window).
• Shared folders. Like many other virtualization solutions, for easy data exchange between hosts and guests, VirtualBox allows for declaring certain host directories as "shared folders", which can then be accessed from within virtual machines.
VirtualBox 4.1.20 (released 2012-08-20)
This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:
VMM: fixed a crash under rare circumstances for VMs running without hardware virtualization
VMM: fixed a code analysis bug for certain displacement instructions for VMs running without hardware virtualization
VMM: fixed an interpretion bug for TPR read instructions under rare conditions (AMD-V only)
Snapshots: fixed a crash when restoring an old snapshot when powering off a VM (bugs #9604, #10491)
VBoxSVC: be more tolerant against environment variables with strange encodings (bug #8780)
VGA: fixed wrong access check which might cause a crash under certain conditions
NAT: final fix for crashes under rare conditions (bug #10513)
Virtio-net: fixed the problem with receiving of GSO packets in Windows XP guests causing packet loss in host-to-VM transfers
HPET: several fixes (bugs #10170, #10306)
Clipboard: disable the clipboard by default for new VMs
BIOS: the PCI BIOS was not properly detected with the chipset type set to ICH9 (bugs #9301, #10327)
Mac OS X hosts: adaptions to Mountain Lion
Linux Installer: fixes for Gentoo Linux (bug #10642)
Linux guests: fixed mouse integration on Fedora 17 guests (bug #2306)
Linux Additions: compile fixes for RHEL/CentOS 6.3 (bug #10756)
Linux Additions: compile fixes for Linux 3.5-rc1 and Linux 3.6-rc1 (bug #10709)
Solaris host: fixed a guru meditation while allocating large pages (bug #10600)
Solaris host: fixed possible kernel panics while freeing memory
Solaris Installer: fixed missing icon for menu and desktop shortcuts
32Bit (Size: 70.7MB)
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