14 DAY TRIAL // VirtualBox is a virtualization application that allows users to run and install operating systems inside other OSes. The latest 5.0 branch of the application has been upgraded, and quite a lot of fixes have been implemented.
VirtualBox is one of the best applications for OS virtualization, and it comes with numerous features. This also means that it needs a lot of maintenance and that its developers need to keep it updated in order for it to keep up the pace with the operating systems. Oracle offers this application for multiple platforms, including Linux, so many of the entries in the changelog are actually for other operating systems and don't really apply.
One of the most important changes in VirtualBox is for the Linux kernel. It needs to be compliant with the latest version of the kernel, which is not an easy job to do if we take a look at how fast new versions are made available.
VirtualBox 5.0.2 is a maintenance version
According to the changelog, support for guest crash report MSRs with Hyper-V paravirtualization has been added, an issue causing artificially high load averages on Linux hosts has been fixed, a kernel panic with thread-context hooks caused by incompatible changes made to Linux 4.2 kernels has been corrected, and a few crashes caused by the Qt alien widgets feature have been corrected.
Also, more fixes have been added for activated SMAP on Linux 3.19 and newer, the name space is now checked before attaching to a host network interface, various Linux 4.2 fixes have been added, and the performance of stat() has been improved to speed up certain file operations on shared folders.
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 5.0.2 from Softpedia.