VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware, targeted at server, desktop and embedded use. Virtual-box is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is Virtual-box 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) version 2.


Changes in VirtualBox 5.0 Version:

  • Paravirtualization support for Windows and Linux guests to improve time-keeping accuracy and performance (see the manual for more information)
  • 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)
  • VMM: improved timing on Solaris hosts with older VT-x hosts without preemption timers
  • VMM: further improvements for TSC frequency measurements and guest timekeeping
  • VMM: debug facility now includes the guest CPU's FPU/SSE/extended state in the core dump
  • VMM: fixed a hang under rare conditions on 32-bit hosts
  • VMM: several fixes


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