Download VirtualBox 5.1.0

Shortly after the release candidate of VirtualBox version 5.1, the final release has now appeared. 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, MacOS, Linux and Solaris, and is able to guest operating systems to turn.

In version 5.1 of VirtualBox we find, among other things, new apic implementations that provide various performance improvements, there is improved support for Python 3 and the interface has been switched to Qt5. The most important changes and improvements made in version 5.1 are listed below.

This is a major update. The following major new features were added:

• VMM: new APIC and I/O APIC implementations that result in significantly improved performance in certain situations (for example with networking, bug #15295)
• VMM: added support for Hyper-V paravirtualized debugging of Windows guests
• VMM: emulate even more MMIO and shadow pagetable exits without going back to user mode
• GUI: overall migration to Qt5 (bug #11775)
• GUI: passive API event listener improving the VM GUI performance and response time
• Audio: added HDA (High Definition Audio) support for newer Linux guests
• Audio: added on-demand timers which should improve the overall performance and reduce the CPU consumption
• Audio: more fine-grained volume control for the AC’97 emulation, which now also takes the master volume control into account
• better support for Python 3

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

• VMM: activate the x2APIC by default for Linux guests
• VMM: many more fixes
• GUI: the Detach UI action is now a part of the VM Machine menu
• GUI: reworked session information window
• GUI: the new VM wizard now allows to choose the VM location for the VM which is being created
• GUI: fixed location of touch events in unscaled HiDPI mode (bugs #14366, #14367)
• GUI: various bug fixes and internal cleanup
• Storage: use fallocate() or similar if present to speed up creating fixed-sized disk images (bug #5967)
• Storage: implemented NVMHCI-compatible storage controller
• Audio: various bug fixes and infrastructure improvements
• E1000: implemented interrupt throttling for performance improvements
• EFI: many improvements, for example allow to boot from USB
• OVF: improved handling of signed manifests
• API: Windows XP guests and Windows 2003 server guests now default to the E1000 T Server network card
• VBoxSVC: fixed several memory leaks when handling .dmg images
• Installers: ship VBoxBugReport
• Windows hosts: reworked COM proxy (eg bug #8298)
• Linux installers: no longer rely on DKMS for module rebuilding
• Linux Additions: fix a problem when updating the initramfs after the guest modules are compiled (bug #15579)
• Linux Additions: try to fix a problem where the OpenGL libraries where loaded by the X server when we only support X clients (bug #15574)