VirtualBox 5.2.2 released

Today Oracle released VirtualBox 5.2.2, a maintenance release which improves stability and fixes several bugs.

VirtualBox is a cross-platform virtualization application that allows you to run multiple operating systems at the same time on your computer.  With VirtualBox you can run Windows and Linux on your Mac, all alongside your existing Mac applications. You can install and run as many virtual machines as you like — the only practical limits are disk space and memory.

VirtualBox 5.2.2 can be downloaded here.

VirtualBox 5.2.2 (released 2017-11-24)

This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:

• User interface: various improvements for high resolution screens
• User interface: added functionality to duplicate optical and floppy images
• User interface: various improvements for the virtual media manager
• VMM: fixed emulation so that Plan 9 guests can start once more (5.1.0 regression)
• Storage: fixed regression breaking iSCSI (bug #17196)
• Audio: added HDA support for more exotic guests (e.g. Haiku)
• Serial: fixed hanging I/O when using named pipes on Windows (5.2.0 regression; bug #17227)
• Serial: fixed broken communication with certain devices on Linux hosts
• USB/OHCI: improved behavior so that the controller state after a VM reset is closer to the initial state after VM start
• EFI: fixed HFS+ driver which in rare cases failed to access most files on a volume
• Shared clipboard: fixed hang with OS X host and Linux guest (bug #15782)
• Linux hosts: fixed kernel module compilation and start failures with Linux kernel 4.14 (bug #17267)
• X11 hosts: better handle WM_CLASS setting (bug #12534)
• Linux guests: fixed kernel module compilation and other problems with Linux kernel 4.14 (bug #12534)
• Linux guests: fixed kernel module compilation and other problems with Linux kernel 4.14
• Linux guests: fixed various 5.2.0 regressions (bug #17163)
• Bridged networking: fixed duplicate EtherType in VLAN/priority tags on Linux (5.2.0 regression; bug #17277)

VirtualBox 5.2.0 (released 2017-10-18)

This is a major update. The following major new features were added:

• VM export to Oracle Cloud (OPC)
• Unattended guest installation (bug #5810; see the manual for more information)
• Overhauled VM selector GUI (improved tools VM / global tools handling, new icons)
• Added experimental audio support for video recording

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

• VMM: fixed reason for recent Linux kernels on also recent CPU models warning about “XSAVE consistency problem”
• GUI: Virtual Media Manager rework allowing to manage media attributes, like size, location, type and description
• GUI: Host-only Network Manager implemented to simplify managing corresponding networks and their attributes
• GUI: Snapshot Pane rework allowing to manage snapshot attributes, like name and description; reworked snapshot details which looks more clear, corresponds to VM Details pane and reflects current VM state difference according to last snapshot taken
• GUI: Audio settings extended with possibility to enable/disable audio input/output; corresponding changed were done to Audio and Video Capture settings pages; VM Devices menu and status-bar extended with corresponding actions and indicator as well
• GUI: improvements with accessibility support
• GUI: Fixed double mouse cursor when using mouse integration without Guest Additions, actually a Qt 5.6 bug fixed with QT 5.6.3 (Mac OS X hosts only; bug #15610)
• Audio: implemented (optional) device enumeration support for audio backends
• Audio: implemented support for host device callbacks (e.g. when adding or removing an audio device)
• Audio: HDA emulation now uses asynchronous data processing in separate threads
• Audio: implemented ability to enable or disable audio input / output on-the-fly
• Storage: implemented support for CUE/BIN images as CD/DVD media including multiple tracks
• Storage: implemented support for the controller memory buffer feature for NVMe
• Storage: first milestone of the I/O stack redesign landed
• E1000: Fix for Windows XP freeze when booting with unplugged cable
• NAT network: do not skip some port forwarding setup when multiple VMs are active (Windows hosts only; bug #17041)
• Serial: fixed extremely rare misbehavior on VM poweroff
• EFI: better video mode handling, supporting custom video modes and easier configuration (bug #6783)
• BIOS: properly report floppy logical sectors per track for unusual formats
• BIOS: update ATA disk parameter table vectors only if there is actually a corresponding ATA disk attached
• PXE: speed up booting by better handling pending packets when the link is not up yet
• VBoxManage: handle CPUID sub-leaf overrides better
• Windows Additions: fix several 3D related crashes
• Solaris hosts: allow increasing MTU size for host-only adapter to 9706 bytes to support jumbo frames
• Linux Additions: on systems using systemd, make sure that only the Guest Additions timesync service is active
• many unlisted fixes and improvements