VirtualBox 6.1.2 is now available for download

Jan 15, 2020 14:26 GMT  ·  By

Oracle has released today the first maintenance update to the latest VirtualBox 6.1 series of its open-source and cross-platform virtualization software for all supported platforms.

VirtualBox 6.1.2 is here to add a month's worth of new bug fixes  and improvements to the popular virtualization software developed by Oracle, adding initial support for the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel series, which should hit the streets later this month. For now, Guest Additions are not supported.

For the Linux platform, VirtualBox 6.1.2 also improves resize and multi-monitor handling for virtual machines using VMSVGA in Linux guests. However, Oracle notes the fact that the "do not disable a monitor "in the middle"" issue is still present in this release and it causes confusion for users.

For the Windows platform, VirtualBox 6.1.2 re-adds the vbox-img.exe utility in the Windows installer, implements accelerated 2D video decoding when the virtual machine is set to use VBoxSVGA with 3D enabled, makes the upgrading of the mouse filter driver more reliable in Windows guests, and restores the original Direct3D files when uninstalling older Guest Additions.

For all supported platforms, this release adds read-only support for compressed clusters in QCOW2 images, improves the performance of virtio-scsi virtualized storage stack for KVM, improves audio input handling when using VRDE, and improves the use of encrypted disks with snapshots.

Bug fixes, other improvements

Several bugs were addressed in the VirtualBox 6.1.2 update, including a crash that occurred in the HDA emulation when using multi-speaker configurations, performance issue with Windows XP guests on AMD hosts, as well as the updating of the runtime info in the graphical user interface for all platforms.

For BSD users, VirtualBox 6.1.2 makes the IBRS/IBPB CPUID feature reporting more consistent to avoids a crash of the NetBSD 9.0 RC1 installer. You can download VirtualBox 6.1.2 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems right now through our free software portal.