VirtualBox 4.2 Release Candidate 2 released

Postings relating to old VirtualBox pre-releases
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klaus
Oracle Corporation
Posts: 1101
Joined: 10. May 2007, 14:57

VirtualBox 4.2 Release Candidate 2 released

Post by klaus »

Please do NOT use this VirtualBox Release Candidate on production machines. Entering Release candidate phase means that the feature list is frozen. A VirtualBox Release Candidate is meant for evaluation and testing purposes.

You can download the binaries here.

Please do NOT open bug reports at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Bugtracker but use our VirtualBox Beta/Release Candidate Feedback forum to report any problems with the Release Candidate. Please concentrate on reporting regressions since VirtualBox 4.1.18.

Incomplete list of fixes since VirtualBox 4.2.0 RC1:
  • Windows 3.x/9x runs without hardware virtualization again (broken in Beta 1)
  • Booting from SATA disks > 128GB works again (broken in Beta 1)
  • Mixing AHCI and SCSI controllers produces same disk order as 4.1 (broken in Beta 1)
  • OS/2 guests with APM.SYS no longer crash during boot (broken in RC1)
  • 64-bit guests on 32-bit OSX Snow Leopard hosts made the host hang
  • enable "Hypervisor Present bit" for OS X guests
  • Guest Execute fixes
  • GUI fixes
  • EFI fixes
  • Main: validate group name collision with existing VM names
  • Main: don't crash during restoring a snapshot if the chipset type changed in the meantime
  • Disk: allow to restore a VM from a saved state if the VM was moved to a file system where we have to disable async I/O
  • Linux 3.6 compilation fixes for shared folders
  • fixed dkms.conf LF problem
VirtualBox 4.2 will be a new major release. The following major new features were added:
  • Improved Windows 8 support, in particular many 3D-related fixes
  • GUI: VM groups (bug #288)
  • GUI: expert mode for wizards
  • GUI: allow to alter some settings during runtime
  • Support for up to 36 network cards, in combination with an ICH9 chipset configuration (bug #8805)
  • Resource control: added support for limiting network IO bandwidth; see the manual for more information
  • Added possibility to start VMs during system boot on Linux, OS X and Solaris; see the manual for more information (bug #950)
  • Added experimental support for Drag'n'drop from the host to Linux guests. Support for more guests and for guest-to-host is planned. (bug #81)
  • Added support for parallel port passthrough on Windows hosts
  • Enhanced API for controlling the guest; please see the SDK reference and the API documentation for more information
In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:
  • Mac OS X hosts: sign application and installer to avoid warnings on Mountain Lion
  • VMM: improved VM context switch performance for Intel CPUs using nested paging
  • VMM: added support for FlushByASID features of AMD CPUs (Bulldozer and newer)
  • VMM: fixed unreal mode handling on older CPUs with VT-x (gPXE, Solaris 7/8/9; bug #9941)
  • VMM: fixed MP tables fixes for I/O APIC interrupt routing relevant for ancient SMP guests (e.g. old OS/2 releases)
  • VMM: support recent VIA CPUs (bug #10005)
  • GUI: network operations manager
  • GUI: allow taking screenshots of the current VM window content
  • GUI: allow automatically sorting of the VM list
  • GUI: allow starting of headless VMs from the GUI
  • GUI: allow reset, shutdown and poweroff from the Manager window
  • GUI: allow to globally limit the maximum screen resolution for guests
  • GUI: show the full medium part on hovering the list of recently used ISO images
  • GUI: do not create additional folders when a new machine has a separator character in its name (bug #6541)
  • GUI: don't crash on terminate if the settings dialog is still open (bug #9973)
  • Snapshots: fixed a crash when restoring an old snapshot when powering off a VM (bug #10491)
  • Settings: sanitise the name of VM folders and settings file (bug #10549)
  • Settings: allow to store the iSCSI initiator secret encrypted
  • E1000: 802.1q VLAN support
  • Storage: implemented burning of audio CDs in passthrough mode
  • Storage: implemented support for discarding unused image blocks through TRIM for SATA and IDE and UNMAP for SCSI when using VDI images
  • Storage: added support for QED images
  • Storage: added support for QCOW (full support for v1 and readonly support for v2 images)
  • Storage: added readonly support for VHDX images
  • Solaris additions: added support for X.org Server 1.11 and 1.12
  • Windows hosts: no need to recreate host-only adapters after a VirtualBox update
  • Windows hosts: updated toolchain; make the source code compatible to VC 2010 and enable some security-related compiler options
  • NAT: improvements for the built-in TFTP server (bugs #7385, #10286)
This list is not complete. This is a Release Candidate and the code still needs some polishing and not all new features are documented yet. Although we already did a lot of testing and don't expect critical regressions, please backup your data before trying this Release Candidate.
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