Last three months I was very busy. Too many things to do, too many travels, to many… The result of this I had no chance to update my VirtualBox system for newest version. But I notice yesterday, that new version is available – I spend one day a little bit mozy lazy mode with updating/upgaring/de- and installing some software.
I went to VirtualBox Site to download newest version of Oracle’s software (version 4.3.30 released 10th of July). Then I discovered that it’s the family of old builds (as v.4.3.30, v.4.3.28, v.4.3.26 and older):
It was yesterday morning (Sept 13th) when I get newest version of VirtualBox – version 5.0.2 (why i missed version 5.0.0 from 9th July? Have no idea). Neverming. This is the newest, fresh version of VirtualBox. Based on Release Blog form latest versions. In short summary most important from my perspective:
-
support for encryption YAY!!!!
-
disk image encryption
-
encryption settings tab
-
encryption password validation on the fly
-
-
beginning of support for Windows 10
-
fixed crash when opening Windows 10 dialog
-
fixed audio (less important)
-
fixed potential WDDM driver crash
-
Please be aware that Windows 10 is not yet officially supported! There are known problems with VirtualBox 5.0.2 on Windows 10 hosts and with Windows 10 guests. Some of the problems are fixed in the most recent test build which can be found here.
-
-
support USB 3.0
-
support for paravirtualization
The following major new features were added with version 5.0.0:
-
Paravirtualization support for Windows and Linux guests to improve time-keeping accuracy and performance
-
Make more instruction set extensions available to the guest when running with hardware-assisted virtualization and nested paging. Among others this includes: SSE 4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, AVX-2, AES-NI, POPCNT, RDRAND and RDSEED
-
xHCI Controller to support USB 3 devices (see the manual for more information)
-
Drag and drop support (bidirectional) for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests
-
Disk image encryption (see the manual for more information)
-
VMs can now be started in separate mode. The VM process is started headless while the frontend runs as a separate process which can be terminated without stopping the VM.
-
GUI: VM guest-content scaling support (including 3D acceleration)
-
GUI: New User Interface settings page for customizing status-bar, menu-bar and guest-content scaling
-
GUI: New Encryption settings tab for customizing encryption options for disk images
-
GUI: HiDPI support including application icons and optional unscaled HiDPI output on Mac OS X (including 3D acceleration)
-
GUI: Hotplugging support for SATA disks
-
New, modular audio architecture for providing a better abstraction of the host audio backends
-
Support for the NDIS6 networking framework on Windows (default on Vista and later)
This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added with version 5.0.2:
-
VMM: added support for guest crash report MSRs with Hyper-V paravirtualization
-
VMM: fixed an issue causing artifically high load averages on Linux hosts
-
VMM: fixed a kernel panic with thread-context hooks caused by incompatible changes made to Linux 4.2 kernels
-
VMM: fixed VERR_SUPDRV_TSC_DELTA_MEASUREMENT_FAILED Guru Meditations on certain AMD CPUs (5.0 regression; bug #14370)
-
VMM: fixed a crash while creating a guest core dumps via the VM debug facility (5.0 regression)
-
VMM: This release has AVX2 passthrough disabled on every host and AVX passthrough disabled for 64-bit VMs on 32-bit hosts. This will be properly fixed in a future 5.0.x maintenance release (see e.g. bug #14262).
-
GUI: fixed rare hang and crash on VM shutdown/poweroff
-
GUI: X11: fixed few crashes caused by the Qt alien widgets feature
-
GUI: X11: fixed various mini-toolbar geometry quirks like positioning, z-order, transiency issues on certain window managers (bug#14257)
-
GUI: VM menu actions availability should now be properly updated on full-screen/seamless/scaled mode switches
-
GUI: disk encryption password validation should be performed when user confirmed the password, not after each entered symbol
-
GUI: do not change the VM/group selection in the VM Manager to the newly created VM if it was created by another client (e.g. VBoxManage)
-
GUI: Mac OS X: do not treat ‘almost maximized’ VM windows as ‘maximized’, watch for the strict window geometry instead
-
VBoxManage: do not deny changing the network adapter type at VM runtime (5.0 regression; bug #14308)
-
Audio: fix a possible crash on VM process termination (5.0 regression)
-
Storage: improved raw disk access on OS X by unmounting any accessed volume before first use and prevent any mount attempt by the host (bug #14219)
-
3D: basic support for saving/restoring display lists
-
Drag and drop: fixed guest to host transfers on OS X hosts
-
Drag and drop: fixed memory leak on Windows guests
-
Shared Folders: improved path conversion between hosts and guests with different path separators (bug #14153)
-
API: fixed method for setting medium IDs which used zero (invalid) UUIDs instead random (valid) UUIDs if no UUIDs were passed (bug#14350)
-
API: for Windows host fix detection of API client crashes which have a session open
-
Mac OS X hosts: El Capitan USB fixes
-
Windows hosts: fixed crash when opening Windows dialogs from the VM process on Windows 10 (bug #14351)
-
Linux hosts: more fixes for activated SMAP on Linux 3.19 and newer (Broadwell and later; bug #13961)
-
Linux Additions: improved the performance of stat() to speed up certain file operations on shared folders
-
Solaris Additions: added support for X.Org Server 1.17
-
X11 Additions: various seamless mode fixes, including invisible windows under LXDE.
Now you can do to DOWNLOAD PAGE, get it for free and install: Virtual Box (for host) an Extension Pack (for host/guests). By downloading, you agree to the terms and conditions of the respective license.
-
VirtualBox platform packages. The binaries are released under the terms of the GPL version 2.
-
VirtualBox 5.0.2 Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack All supported platforms
Please install the extension pack with the same version as your installed version of VirtualBox! -
VirtualBox 5.0.2 Software Developer Kit (SDK) All platforms
##### ##### ##### ##### ##### #####
What’s new BEFORE installation? Is not as easy as could be:
Pict. 01 | Two processes blocking installation. Just kill them and click next.
Pict. 02 | Another nine processes stopped installation. Should I kill them immediately? Nope!
Here is the list of all (in my case):
- 11652 – iTunes Helper
- 15332 – Outlook
- 18004 – Total Commander
- 2128 – iType
- 2248 – Apple Mobile Device Service
- 28300 – Microsoft Word
- 5304 – Lync (Skype for Business)
- 6092 – Snipping Tool
- 8472 – Send To One Note
How they are connected with VirtualBox? It’s question for another post…
Pict. 03 | After firs execution we need update Extension Pack to version 5.0.2 release 102096
Pict. 04 | Here we can see three newest features: USB 3.0, support for WebCam (!) and Disk Encryption
What’s new AFTER installation? Some samples just from interface:
Pict. 05 | Section: GENERAL >> new bookmark: Encryption /Cifrado. And User Interface/Interfaz de Usario at the bottom. We will back for this part, later.
Pict. 06 | Section: GENERAL >> Bookmark Encryption and three options: Leave without Changes/Dejar sin Cambiar, encryption AES-128bit and encryption AES-256bit (only word PLAIN is a little strange, but I will investigate it later). Of course my machine is not prepared for encryption (I will investigate it later).
Pict. 07 | Section: SYSTEMS/SISTEMA >> Motherboard/Placa Base with new functionality : support for USB Tablet/Tableta USB (very useful for for graphic desiners)
Pict. 08 | Section: SCREEN >> new feature for standard screen Scaling (zooming)/Factor de Escalado (useful for disabled users)
Pict. 09 | Section: SCREEN >> bookmark Video Capturing/Captura de Video Whoooha! amazingly funcionality added not only speed (fps) but quality too (kbps). hope support for more screens will be added soon.
Pict. 10 | Section USB – not only full support for USB 1.1, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 but easy way to enforce which USB we want to share with virtual machine.
Pict. 11 | Section USER INTERFACE/INTERFAZ DE USARIO >> new functionality which give the administrator opportunity to choose which tasks, features, settings will be available for users.
And finally one of the newest functionality: The User Interface for VM’s, that has been tried and tested on a mock api:
Pict. 12 | Section: ARCHIVE >> Preferences, Network
Pict. 13 | Section: MACHINE/MÁQUINA >> Configuration, Pause, Start, Save State, Shutdown and more
Pict. 14 | Section VIEW/VER >> Full Screen, Scaling Mode, Capturing Screen, Capturing Video, Remote Desktop, Virtual Screen, qutoscaling and more
Pict. 15 | Section: INPUT/ENTRADA >> Keyboard, Mouse
Pict. 16 | Section: DEVICES/DISPOSITIVOS >> Disks, Camera, Network, USB, HDD, FDD, DVD, Shared Folders and most important Insert CD <Guest Additions> which is nomally use to connect external CD/DVD or throught process of instalaltion VirtualBox Extension Pack
Pict. 17 |Section: RUN/DEPURAR >> Statistics, Command Line, Trace Logs, History
Pict. 18 | Section: ABOUT/AYUDA >> with links to VirtualBox Site, and info about installed version of VirtualBox
Really, Really nice. Gooood Jooob Oracle!