14 DAY TRIAL // The monthly maintenance update of the popular, open-source, and cross-platform VirtualBox virtualization software from Oracle is here, VirtualBox 5.1.6, available now for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows platforms.
VirtualBox 5.1.6 is the bugfix release for September 2016, and looking at the official changelog, we can notice that there's initial support for the Linux 4.8 kernel series, as Oracle managed to patch VirtualBox to support the kernel display driver included in this forthcoming version.
Also, the Linux installers have been updated in VirtualBox 5.1.6 to fix a regression in the .rpm packages that won't link to the correct path of the documentation, as well as to address an issue in the vboxdrv.sh script that brings better support for the SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) Linux kernel security module.
Another interesting change implemented for Linux users is an update to the Linux Additions component that will no longer load the kernel modules available in their GNU/Linux operating system, and instead offer them the ones from the official Guest Additions package. A dynamic resizing bug in Linux guests was repaired as well.
Storage, GUI, NVMe, XHCI, audio, and E1000 improvements
As expected, many other areas of the VirtualBox virtualization software received improvements in today's update, including the NVMe support, allowing users to use multiple NVMe controllers with ICH9, as well as the GUI (Graphical User Interface) with keyboard grabbing and automatic deletion of extension pack files fixes.
The last change mentioned above is a long-lasting bug that affected many users, and caused the extension pack files to fill up your disk drive, so after installing the VirtualBox 5.1.6 update, you should notice that there might be more free disk space available on your main partition. Download VirtualBox 5.1.6 now for Linux, Mac, and Windows.