You can download the binaries here.
Please do NOT open bug reports at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Bugtracker but use this forum to report any problems with the Beta.
We have gone through some effort to keep existing VM configuration files untouched with this new beta. This implies it's easier to go back to an older version. There are exceptions though. If you change a setting that requires an incompatible change to the configuration file, then its internal version will be increased and you will not be able to use it with an older version of VirtualBox. We recommend that you backup all your XML files before evaluating this beta.
Please note the list of known problems and limitations.
Version 3.1 will be a major update. The following major new features were added:
- Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one machine to another
- VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one, and new snapshots can be taken from other snapshots as well (aka branched snapshots)
- 2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and colour conversion
- The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running
- Experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher.
- Significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal (non-nested) paging)
- Experimental support for EFI (Extended Firmware Interface)
- VirtIO network device support
In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:
- VMM: reduced IO-APIC overhead for 32 bits Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 guests; requires 64 bits support (VT-x only; bug #4392)
- VMM: fixed double timer interrupt delivery on old Linux kernels using IO-APIC (caused guest time to run at double speed; bug #3135)
- VMM: reinit VT-x and AMD-V after host suspend or hibernate; some BIOSes forget this (Windows hosts only; bug #5421)
- GUI: prevent starting a VM with a single mouse click (bug #2676)
- 3D support: major performance improvement in VBO processing
- 3D support: added GL_EXT_framebuffer_object, GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array support
- 3D support: fix crashes in FarCry, SecondLife, Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, Eve Online (bugs #2801, #2791)
- 3D support: fix graphics corruption in World of Warcraft (#2816)
- iSCSI: support iSCSI targets with more than 2TiB capacity
- VRDP: fixed occasional VRDP server crash (bug #5424)
- Network: fixed the E1000 emulation for QNX (and probably other) guests (bug #3206)
- Network: even if the virtual network cable was disconnected, some guests were able to send / receive packets (E1000; bug #5366)
- Network: even if the virtual network cable was disconnected, the PCNet card received some spurious packets which might confuse the guest (bug #4496)
- VMDK: fixed handling of split image variants
- VHD: fixed incompatibility with Hyper-V
- OVF: create manifest files on export and verify the content of an optional manifest file on import
- X11 based hosts: allow the user to specify their own scan code layout (bug #2302)
- Mac OS X hosts: don't auto show the menu and dock in fullscreen (#bug 4866)
- Solaris hosts: combined the kernel interface package into the VirtualBox main package
- Solaris hosts: support for OpenSolaris Boomer architecture (with OSS audio backend).
- Shared folders: fixed changing case of file names (bug #2520)
- Shared folders: VBOXSVR is visible in Network folder (bug #4842)
- Windows and Linux Additions: added balloon tip notifier if VirtualBox host version was updated and Additions are out of date
- Solaris Additions: fixed as_pagelock() failed errors affecting guest properties (bug #5337)
- Windows Additions: added automatic logon support for Windows Vista and Windows 7
- Windows Additions: fix crash in seamless mode (contributed by Huihong Luo)
- Linux Additions: added support for uninstalling the Linux Guest Additions (bug #4039)
- SDK: added object-oriented web service bindings for PHP5
