14 DAY TRIAL // On February 25, Oracle announced the immediate availability for download of the powerful VirtualBox 4.3.8 virtualization application for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems.
After a couple of development versions, the brand new VirtualBox 4.3.8 release reached the stable channel, replacing the old 4.3.6 version, for which it fixes numerous bugs reported by the community. In addition, it adds many new features and improvements that should have been implemented a long time ago.
For Linux, the new build introduces support for X.Org Server 1.15, fixes CPU hot-remove issues that occurred on newer versions of the Linux kernel, and supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 kernels.
Additionally, the physical package ID is now taken into consideration when determining the number of physical CPU cores of a Linux host, and it will no longer write warning messages in the kernel log if memory allocation fails on both Linux guests and hosts.
The disk geometry of SCSI drives is now handled much better, IPv6 reassembly issues have been repaired, ping proxy support has been implemented, various MSR registers can now be emulated better, and initial support for SSE 4.1/4.2 passthrough has been implemented in the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) component.
Another interesting feature is that the Virtual Machine wizard will now propose 64-bit guests if a 64-bit host is detected, by default. Also, the application will warn users if the Oracle Extension Pack is not installed when they try to activate the remote display feature.
Furthermore, recent Linux kernels that feature software virtualization are supported by default, 3D content is now included in captured screenshots and videos, an issue when ejecting a CD/DVD medium was repaired, and the application will now properly see if the ifconfig command is located in the /bin directory or not, on Linux hosts.
We should also mention that VirtualBox 4.3.8 brings a fix for the shared folders functionality, repairs the autostart SMF script on Solaris hosts, and fixes disk hotplugging and multiscreen issues and a problem with the application icon on Mac OS X hosts.
Several repairs were implemented in Windows Additions and Windows hosts, especially VBoxTray leaks, and a crash that occurred during the detection of active guest users is fixed. In addition, the new VirtualBox release introduces several improvements for the graphical user interface (GUI) and properly handles legacy graphics modes when Guest Additions are active.