14 DAY TRIAL // Oracle announced today, January 17, 2017, the release of VirtualBox 5.1.14 and 5.0.32, the seventh and sixteenth maintenance updates to the VirtualBox 5.1 and VirtualBox 5.0 stable series respectively.
Both VirtualBox 5.1.14 and VirtualBox 5.0.32 are bugfix releases that only add various improvements to the virtual machine manager, graphical user interface, VBoxSVC process, OVF and NVMe support, as well as platform specific changes, such as better support for the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel for Linux hosts.
The Linux Additions have been improved as well in both VirtualBox releases, fixing a protocol error that occurred during certain operations on shared folders, and it looks like the VirtualBox 5.0 series now compiles against the Linux 4.9 and Linux 2.6.28 kernels for both Linux hosts and guests.
The VirtualBox 5.1 series being the "big brother," it gets the most advanced features, and Oracle added a sanity check to the "vboxmanage modifymedium --resize" command, preventing users from resizing their disk drives from 1GB to 1PB. Additionally, the new version allows cloning of snapshots when the virtual machine is running.
Asynchronous I/O disabled automatically for Linux 2.6.18 kernels
For Linux hosts, VirtualBox 5.0.32 now automatically disables asynchronous I/O on operating systems running a kernel from the Linux 2.6.18 branch because high I/O load could have triggered "kernel oopses" on these kernel series if the feature were enabled by default.
We mentioned above that these new VirtualBox maintenance releases improve NVM Express (NVMe) support, and it looks like VirtualBox 5.1.14 offers better compatibility with the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK), a set of libraries and tools aimed at devs who want to write scalable, high-performance, and user-mode storage apps.
Other improvements implemented in VirtualBox 5.1.14 include better emulation of various instructions for 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts, proper handling of certain MSRs for 64-bit guests on aged processors that don't feature VT-x support for MSR bitmaps, as well as a GUI crash that occurred for users with some multi-monitor configurations.
On the other hand, Oracle addresses an issue with the LsiLogic SCSI controller that could have led to loss of requests with symmetric multiprocessor system (SMP) guests, and improves import of OVF appliances by correctly handling default settings. Download VirtualBox 5.1.14 and 5.0.32 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.