14 DAY TRIAL // Oracle has announced that its VirtualBox virtualization product for enterprises and end users has been upgraded to version 4.3.14, fixing numerous problems and improving a number of features.
The developers of VirtualBox have several branches that are being developed at the same time and all of them are stable. In fact, users will find that they can choose between the following versions: 4.3.14, 4.2.26, 4.1.34, 4.0.26, and 3.2.24.
VirtualBox 4.3.14 is the most advanced version and it's probably the most used branch. This latest release can be considered a maintenance one, although there are quite a few changes that might warrant a higher version number.
For example, more fixes have been implemented for MSR emulation on certain hardware, the MSI handling has been improved under some circumstances (only for the ICH9 chipset), an #UD exception for 64-bit guests with the EFER.SCE bit and the SYSCALL instruction has been fixed, timekeeping is now working properly after resuming SMP guests, the VM now wakes up a halted VCPU on NMI/SMI properly, a potential crash caused by the GUI has been fixed, a potential error that occurred during the version check has been corrected, a shortcut change should no longer require Enter/Return (or other trigger) to confirm, and the update check is no longer broken due to changing the location of the root certificates.
Also, slow upload NAT speeds under certain conditions have been fixed, a potential loss of inbound TCP data has been corrected, potential infinite stalls of TCP connections over IPv6 have been fixed, a socket leak on Solaris hosts has been closed, a possible crash that occurred with CD/DVD passthrough under certain circumstances has been fixed, a number of USB performance fixes have been integrated, several fixes have been added for the 3D emulation, the software is now compatible with Linux kernel 3.16, and 3D pass-through now works with recent versions of Mesa in the guest.
The VirtualBox solution is capable of running a large number of OSes, including Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts, not to mention a lot of other guest additions.
The VirtualBox 4.3 branch of the software can be considered a very stable one, especially after the large number of updates that have been issued until now for the application.
More details about this release can be found in the official announcement. You can also check our review of VirtualBox and you can also download VirtualBox 4.3.14 from Softpedia.