Download VirtualBox 4.2.0 Beta 1

Oracle has released the first beta release of version 4.2 of VirtualBox. VirtualBox can be used to install other operating systems in a virtual environment on a computer. In this way it is possible to use different operating systems on the same hardware side by side and at the same time. VirtualBox is available for Windows XP and above, Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris, and is capable of many guest operating systems to turn.

Version 4.2 of VirtualBox brings, among other things, improved support for Windows 8. In addition, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X now allow virtual machines to be started at boot time and files can be copied to Linux hosts using drag & drop. The full changelog for this release is below.

The following major new features were added:

• Improved Windows 8 support, in particular many 3D-related fixes
• GUI: VM groups (bug #288)
• GUI: expert mode for wizards
• GUI: allow to alter some settings during runtime
• Support for up to 36 network cards, in combination with an ICH9 chipset configuration (bug #8805)
• Resource control: added support for limiting network IO bandwidth; see the manual for more information
• Added possibility to start VMs during system boot on Linux, OS X and Solaris; see the manual for more information (bug #950)
• Added experimental support for Drag’n’drop from the host to Linux guests. Support for more guests and for guest-to-host is planned. (bug #81)

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

• VMM: improved VM context switch performance for Intel CPUs using nested paging
• VMM: added support for FlushByASID features of AMD CPUs (Bulldozer and newer)
• VMM: fixed unreal mode handling on older CPUs with VT-x (gPXE, Solaris 7/8/9; bug #9941)
• VMM: fixed MP tables fixes for I/O APIC interrupt routing relevant for ancient SMP guests (eg old OS/2 releases)
• VMM: support recent VIA CPUs (bug #10005)
• GUI: network operations manager
• GUI: allow taking screenshots of the current VM window content
• GUI: allow automatically sorting of the VM list
• GUI: allow starting of headless VMs from the GUI
• GUI: allow reset, shutdown and poweroff from the Manager window
• GUI: allow to globally limit the maximum screen resolution for guests
• GUI: show the full medium part on hovering the list of recently used ISO images
• GUI: do not create additional folders when a new machine has a separator character in its name (bug #6541)
• GUI: don’t crash on terminate if the settings dialog is still open (bug #9973)
• Snapshots: fixed a crash when restoring an old snapshot when powering off a VM (bug #10491)
• Settings: sanitize the name of VM folders and settings file (bug #10549)
• Settings: allow to store the iSCSI initiator secret encrypted
• E1000: 802.1q VLAN support
• Storage: implemented burning of audio CDs in passthrough mode
• Storage: implemented support for discarding unused image blocks through TRIM for SATA and IDE and UNMAP for SCSI when using VDI images
• Storage: added support for QED images
• Storage: added support for QCOW (full support for v1 and readonly support for v2 images)
• Storage: added readonly support for VHDX images
• Solaris additions: added support for X.org Server 1.11 and 1.12
• Windows hosts: no need to recreate host-only adapters after a VirtualBox update
• Windows hosts: updated toolchain; make the source code compatible to VC 2010 and enable some security-related compiler options

VirtualBox 4.2.0 beta 1 screenshot, click on the image for a larger version.