# The following major new features were added:
* Improved Windows 8 support, in particular many 3D-related fixes
* GUI: VM groups
* 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
* Resource control: added support for limiting network IO bandwidth; see Section 6.9, “Limiting bandwidth for network I/O”
* Added possibility to start VMs during system boot on Linux, OS X and Solaris; see Section 9.24, “Starting virtual machines during system boot”
* Added experimental support for Drag'n'drop from the host to Linux guests. Support for more guests and for guest-to-host is planned.
* Added support for Host parallel port passthrough on Windows platform
# 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)
* 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
* 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
* GUI: don't crash on terminate if the settings dialog is still open
* Snapshots: fixed a crash when restoring an old snapshot when powering off a VM
* Settings: sanitise the name of VM folders and settings file
* 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
Umbra Corp. said:OAP is not compatible with it, so i can't use Vbox anymore.
# The following items were fixed and/or added:
* VMM: fixed a crash under rare circumstances for VMs running without hardware virtualization
* VMM: fixed a code analysis bug for certain displacement instructions for VMs running without hardware virtualization
* VMM: fixed an interpretion bug for TPR read instructions under rare conditions
* Snapshots: fixed a crash when restoring an old snapshot when powering off a VM
* VBoxSVC: be more tolerant against environment variables with strange encodings
* VGA: fixed wrong access check which might cause a crash under certain conditions
* NAT: final fix for crashes under rare conditions
* Virtio-net: fixed the problem with receiving of GSO packets in Windows XP guests causing packet loss in host-to-VM transfers
* HPET: several fixes
* Clipboard: disable the clipboard by default for new VMs
* BIOS: the PCI BIOS was not properly detected with the chipset type set to ICH9
* Mac OS X hosts: adaptions to Mountain Lion
* Linux Installer: fixes for Gentoo Linux
* Linux guests: fixed mouse integration on Fedora 17 guests
* Linux Additions: compile fixes for RHEL/CentOS 6.3
* Linux Additions: compile fixes for Linux 3.5-rc1 and Linux 3.6-rc1
* Solaris host: fixed a guru meditation while allocating large pages
* Solaris host: fixed possible kernel panics while freeing memory
* Solaris Installer: fixed missing icon for menu and desktop shortcuts
# The following major new features were added:
- Improved Windows 8 support, in particular many 3D-related fixes
- GUI: VM groups
- 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
- Resource control: added support for limiting network IO bandwidth
- Added possibility to start VMs during system boot on Linux, OS X and Solaris
- Added experimental support for Drag'n'drop from the host to Linux guests. Support for more guests and for guest-to-host is planned.
- Added support for parallel port passthrough on Windows hosts
- Enhanced API for controlling the guest; please see the SDK reference and 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)
- 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
- VMM: fixed handling of task gates if VT-x/AMD-V is disabled
- 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
- GUI: don't crash on terminate if the settings dialog is still open
- GUI: consider scaled DPI values when display fonts on Windows hosts
- Snapshots: fixed a crash when restoring an old snapshot when powering off a VM
- Clipboard: disable the clipboard by default for new VMs. It can be enabled at any time using the VM menu.
- Settings: sanitise the name of VM folders and settings file
- Settings: allow to store the iSCSI initiator secret encrypted
- NAT: improvements for the built-in TFTP server
- E1000: 802.1q VLAN support
- Storage: implemented burning of audio CDs in passthrough mode
- Storage: fixed audio CD passthrough for certain media players
- 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
- Solaris additions: switched to using an in-kernel mouse driver
- 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
VirtualBox 4.2.0 (released 2012-09-13)
This version is a major update. 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 (bug #3653)
- 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 API documentation for more information
In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:
Read more...
VirtualBox 4.2.2 (released 2012-10-18)
This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:
VMM: adapted to changes in Mac OS X 10.8.2 (bug #10965)
GUI: restored VM item tool-tip functionality (4.2 regression)
GUI: added group item tool-tip functionality
GUI: fixed handling of the .ova/.ovf file name association (4.2 regression)
GUI: it was not possible to change any setting before the first VM was created (bug #10928)
GUI: disable grouping action if all the selected items are full children list of the same group already
GUI: added menu for runtime drag-and-drop option change
GUI: cleanup shared-clipboard menu on visual-mode change
GUI: make sure VM receives keyboard focus on entering fullscreen-mode on Win host (bug #11051)
GUI: disable proxy authentication for security reasons
3D Support: DrawIndexedPrimitiveUP implementation fixes for the Windows WDDM video driver (bug #10929)
Storage: fixed a release assertion in the AHCI emulation when requests where canceled with asynchronous I/O disabled
Storage: fixed a hang during VM reset under certain circumstances (bug #10898)
NAT: fixed a crash under rare circumstances (Windows hosts only; bug #10128)
NAT: automatically use the host resolver if the host name server is set to some unusual loopback value (bug #10864)
E1000: fixed a VirtualBox crash during intensive network transfers (4.2 regression; bugs #10936, #10969, #10980)
ICH9: fixed PCI bridge initialization
USB mouse: ensure that the last mouse event doesn't get lost if no URBs are available
BIOS: certain legacy guests (e.g. Windows 95) didn't find the boot device after a warm reboot
BIOS: don't trash the palette in text modes when setting the border color
EFI: fixed OS X guest autoboot (4.2 regression)
VBoxManage: fixed output of showvminfo --machinereadable (bug #10973)
VBoxManage: fixed parsing of storageattach --discard (bug #11023)
VBoxManage: fixed wrong output of the HPET setting in showvminfo (bug #11065)
VBoxManage: fixed closing the guest session after executing a guest process via guest control
VBoxShell: adaptions to interface name changes
Guest Additions device: fixed a Guest Additions hang when a machine was reset after a crash
Linux hosts / guests: Linux 3.7-rc1 fixes
Linux Additions: support X.Org Server 1.13
Linux Additions: fixed a hang when the X server was restarted with old guest kernels
Linux Additions: fixed a VBoxService crash during CPU hot remove (bug #10964)
Windows Additions: fixed automatic screen resize issue for NT4 guests
OS/2 Additions: fixed shutdown hang
OS/2 Additions: fixed mouse driver panic
Solaris hosts: fixed autostart service going into maintenance mode after all VMs started
Solaris hosts: fixed linking the host driver with the dtrace module
This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:
VMM: don't inject stale VT-x events to prevent crashes after VM reset (bug #11256)
VMM: workaround for buggy BIOSes which enable MONITOR only for certain CPUs (bugs #9460, #10686)
GUI: fixed trimming of anti-aliased text in details-view element headers (4.2.0 regression)
GUI: fixed create-settings-file-alias functionality on Mac hosts (4.2.0 regression)
GUI: fixed take-guest-screenshot functionality on Windows hosts (bug #11095)
GUI: several minor fixes, including palette fixes (bug #11191)
GUI: fixed Windows 2012 OS type (bug #11206)
GUI: allow to terminate the VM even if VBoxSVC crashed
API: fixed cancelling of snapshots, previously this could lead to inconsistent VM configs (bug #6877)
API: fixed identifying disk images by UUID (bug #11209)
3D Support: several fixes
VRDP: fixed occasional crash with external authentication (bug #11156)
VGA: fix for double scan text modes
USB: fixed invalid pending request count at the time of service of DEVICE POWER requests (Windows hosts only; bugs #10021, #11056)
USB keyboard: Korean keyboard workaround (bug #11150)
Storage: fixed hang with QCOW images and asynchronous I/O enabled
Storage: fixed hang with newer VHD images (bug #11279)
Storage: actually write the non-rotational flag to the VM settings (4.2.0 regression)
Virtio-net: fixed the problem with network statistics counters in Session Information dialog (GUI)
Metrics: introduced network rate and disk usage metrics
Metrics: fixed a crash under certain conditions on Solaris hosts
BIOS: fix for El Torito
Shared Folders: if the host folder of a shared folder mapping does not exist, keep it active but mark it as invalid to prevent inconsitent saved states (bug #11147)
VBoxManage: fixed converting disks from raw images
VBoxManage: show snapshot description in the VM or snapshot information
VBoxManage: make implicit opening of media consistent in all places dealing with media
VBoxManage: the iSCSI initiator name was not stored in the settings file when doing storageattach (bug #11212)
VBoxManage: metrics collect now properly handles 'CPU/MHz' and 'Net/*/LinkSpeed' metrics
VBoxManage: changing the image UUID or parent UUID as part of storageattach works now in all safe cases
VBoxManage: introduced storageattach --medium additions as a shortcut to mount the additions image (bug #11165)
OVF: fixed importing OVF files cerated by recent VMware products (bug #10905)
Linux hosts / Bridged Networking: fixed the problem with leaking connections in conntrack (bug #11178)
Linux Additions: added support for ConsoleKit sessions in the vminfo service of VBoxService
Linux Additions: don't crash during remount under certain conditions (bug #11291)
Linux/Solaris Additions: fixed guest memory metrics collection
Solaris hosts: added a dependency to ensure that the user directories are reachable when starting VBox services
Windows host installer: integrated user-contributed translations, thanks to all contributors!
Windows Additions: fixed auto-logon installation for Windows 8
Windows Additions: don't fail if the shared folders host service is not available
Windows Additions: fixed Guest Additions startup on Windows 2000 guests (bug #11253)
Windows Additions: auto-resize fixes for Windows 8 guests
This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:
VMM: fixed guest crash with huge amount of guest RAM on VT-x hosts (bug #11306)
GUI: fixed a layout bug in the Mac OS X clone VM dialog (bug #10982)
GUI: not all the translation tags were taken into account during the language switch (bug #11342)
GUI: take guest screenshot dialog sometimes had no keyboard input available on Windows host
Main/Machine: fix generation of spurious event for inaccessible VMs which triggered an endless event generation loop in cooperation with the GUI which became unresponsive (4.2.6 regression, bug #11323)
Main/Display: fix for an access violation under certain conditions in multi-monitor configurations (bug #10539)
Main/Metrics: network metrics are now collected for active (up) interfaces only, the state of an interface being evaluated when the associated metric is enabled via setupMetrics
Snapshots: reduce the time for merging snapshots under certain conditions
Storage: fixed data corruption after resizing a VDI image under certain circumstances (bug #11344)
Storage: fixed non working online merging of snapshots (4.2.6 regression, bug #11359)
Storage: fixed crash when connecting to certain QNAP iSCSI targets
Storage: fixed incompatibility of VHD differencing images with Hyper-V (bug #5990)
Bridged Networking: fixed TCP pseudo header checksum computation for IPv6 (bug #9380)
3D support: fix Battlefield 1942 game crashes (bug #11369)
Settings: really sanitize the name of VM folders and settings file, the code was disabled before (bug #10549)
Settings: allow to change VRDE settings for saved VMs
VBoxManage: don't crash during screenshotpng if there is no display (bug #11363)
Linux hosts: work around gcc bug 55940 which might lead to wrong kernel module code if gcc 4.7 is used to compile the 32-bit Linux host kernel (bug #11035)
Linux hosts: fixed inconsistent lock state and deadlock warnings on module load and VM startup when CONFIG_PROVE_LOCKING is enabled (bug #11318)
Linux hosts: made "]" key work again on Japanese keyboards
Mac OS X hosts: don't crash the kernel during dtrace if the VBox kernel extensions are loaded (10.6 hosts only; bug #11273)
Solaris / Mac OS X hosts: machine CPU load metrics now report 100% when all cores are fully utilized (used to be a single core)
Solaris 11 host installer: wait for any services left over from a previous installation to be terminated to avoid confusing SMF.
Guest Additions: don't block signals for processes executed via guest control
Guest Additions: fixed a small memory leak in VBoxService (bug #10970)
Windows Additions: fixed shared folder issue with large reads/writes on 64 bit Windows guests (bug #11115)
Linux Additions: Linux 3.8 compile fixes (bug #11036)
X11 Additions: fixed blocked SIGALRM in 3D desktop sessions (bug #10987)
X11 Additions: fixed an unresolved reference in vboxvideo_drv for X.org 6.8 guests and before (e.g. RHEL4; 4.2.0 regression)
X11 Additions: fixed screen automatic resizing for guests with X.org 1.3 or older (4.2.0 regression)
# The following major new features were added:
+ VMM: major rewrite of the VT-x code including many bug fixes and performance improvements
+ GUI: keyboard shortcuts management (input page of global preferences extended with
+ possibility to edit general keyboard shortcuts for VirtualBox Manager and Virtual Machine)
+ GUI: extended messaging mechanism (new non-modal popup overlays used to show noncritical warnings and provide user with additional information)
+ GUI: video capturing support
+ GUI: host touch devices support (GUI passes host touch-events to guest)
+ Emulated USB touch devices
+ VRDP: support for IPv6
+ NAT: experimental virtual router mode: several VMs are attached to the same internal network and share one NAT service
# In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:
+ VMM: properly handle NMIs on Linux hosts with X2APIC enabled
+ GUI: update check uses https
+ GUI: lot of internal stuff rewritten (cleanup and bug-fixes)
+ Settings: global and per-VM default frontend configuration, useful to select the use of alternative VM frontends
+ Settings: limit depth of snapshot tree to 250 levels, as more will lead to decreased performance and may trigger crashes
+ Main: new event queue implementation which does not use the host’s native event queue for processing VirtualBox events anymore
+ Main: use the XDG standard configuration folder instead of .VirtualBox on systems where it is appropriate
+ VBoxManage: list more information about hard disk/DVD/floppy media, and support the--long option to show really all available details
+ VBoxManage: added support for optional command line parameters for the automatic Guest Additions update
+ VBoxManage: added support for listing active guest sessions, guest processes and/or guest files via guestcontrol list <all|sessions|processes|files>
+ VBoxManage: added support for closing active guest sessions via guestcontrol session close --session-id <ID>| --session-name <name or pattern>|--all
+ VBoxManage: added support for terminating active guest processes via guestcontrol process kill|close|terminate --session-id <ID>| --session-name <name or pattern> <PID> ... <PID n> or guestcontrol [p]kill --session-id <ID>| --session-name <name or pattern> <PID> ... <PID n>
+ VBoxManage: added support for watching guest sessions via guestcontrol watch
+ 3D support: several fixes
+ 3D support: several fixes for Mac OS X hosts
+ OVF: several fixes
+ Keyboard: fix for reporting key sequences like Ctrl+Alt+Del for the USB keyboard emulation
+ Shared Clipboard/X11: support for BMP-format images, contributed by François Revol
+ Windows hosts: don’t cause massive DPC latency
+ Windows hosts: consider symlinks when retrieving volume information
+ Windows Additions: fixed misbehavior with guest display power management (WDDM driver only)
+ Windows guests: ability to track guest user idle times through the newly introduced event IGuestUserStateChangedEvent
landerio said:I am using VMware Player. Can anybody tell the difference of them?