Download VirtualBox 2.2 Beta 1

Sun Microsystems released the first beta release of version 2.2 of VirtualBox on Tuesday. This program can be used to install another operating system in a virtual environment. VirtualBox runs on Windows 2000 and above, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris and can handle a wide range of guest operating systems.

The software is available in two versions. The full version has more functionality, such as support for USB ports and the remote display protocol, but is only free for private use and evaluation purposes. This extra functionality is closed source and is missing in the other version, namely the open source version. Version 2.2 contains a number of important improvements. For example, support for Open Virtualization Format has been added and there is USB support on OpenSolaris and OpenGL on Linux. Below is the changelog for this release:

The following major new features were added:

• OVF (Open Virtualization Format) appliance import and export
• Host-only networking mode
• Hypervisor optimizations with significant performance gains for high context switching rates
• VT-x/AMD-V are enabled by default for newly created virtual machines
• USB (OHCI & EHCI) is enabled by default for newly created virtual machines (Qt GUI only)
• Experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts
• Shared folders for Solaris and OpenSolaris guests
• OpenGL 3d acceleration for Linux guests
• Experimental support for OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) hosts running both the 64-bit and the 32-bit kernel

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

• VMM: FreeBSD guest related fix for V86 flags
• VMM: Fixed guru meditation when booting an AsteriskNow Linux VM
• VMM: Fixed PGMPOOLKIND_FREE guru meditation
• VMM: Fixed Windows XP boot hang (guest PAE + nested paging only)
• VMM: Allow mixing of VT-x/AMD-V and software virtualization
• VMM: fixed extremely safe mode booting in eg Windows 2008 (VT-x/AMD-V only)
• VMM: significant speedup of certain Grub boot loaders (eg Solaris) (VT-x/AMD-V only)
• VMM: real-mode IOPL fix for DOS guests (VT-x only)
• VMM: fixed VT-x detection with certain BIOSes that enable VT-x, but don’t set the lock bit in MSR_IA32_FEATURE_CONTROL
• NAT: Truncated downloads with NAT (ftp)
• NAT: Blocked UDP packets cause crash
• USB: further reduced host CPU utilization for OHCI and EHCI; the “VBoxInternal/Devices/usb-ohci/0/Config/FrameRate” CFG key is no longer necessary and no longer supported
• VRDP: fixed hangs when VRDP server is enabled or disabled in runtime
• X11 guests: show the guest mouse pointer at the right position if the virtual desktop is larger than the guest resolution
• Solaris guests: added xpg4/xcu4 dependency to the guest additions installer
• Linux hosts: do proper reference counting to prevent unloading the vboxnetflt module as long as this code is in use
• Linux installers: fixes for Slackware, Arch Linux and Linux from Scratch systems
• Windows installers: Combined installer executable which contains both (32- and 64-bit) architectures
• VBoxManage: less cryptic command-line error messages
• VBoxManage: ‘list vm’ commands now default to compact format
• Hard disks: improved immutable disk support to auto-reset diff file at VM startup
• GUI: enable the audio adapter by default for new VMs
• GUI: warn if VT-x/AMD-V is not operational when starting a 64 bits guest
• GUI: deactivate 64 bits guest support when the host CPU does not support VT-x/AMD-V
• GUI: removed floppy icon from the status bar
• GUI: show build revision in about dialog
• GUI: fixed sticky status bar text
• GUI/Mac OS X: fixed disabled close button
• GUI: improved error dialogs
• 3D support: added opengl select/feedback support
• 3D support: close opengl subsystem for terminated guest applications
• 3D support: fixed VM hangs when starting guests with 3D acceleration enabled
• PXE: fixed boot hangs when hardware virtualization is used