VirtualBox 4.1 Released

After having several quick Beta release, VirtualBox 4.1 is now officially released by Oracle team in Germany. This is a major upgrade, so new features are introduced along with other bug fixes mentioned on the changelog:

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

• Support for cloning of VMs (bug #5853, see the manual for more information): full clones can be created through the GUI and VBoxManage, linked clones only through VBoxManage
• GUI: enhanced wizard for creating new virtual disks
• GUI: new wizard for copying virtual disks
• GUI: keep the aspect ratio in scale mode (Windows and OSX hosts only; bug #7822)
• VMM: raised the memory limit for 64-bit hosts to 1TB
• Experimental support for PCI passthrough for Linux hosts, see the manual for more information
• Windows guests: Experimental WDDM graphics driver, supporting Windows Aero (bug #4607) and providing Direct3D support using a cleaner approach (no need to install the guest drivers in Safe Mode anymore)
• Guest Additions: status of modules and features can now be queried separately by the frontends
• Networking: new network attachment mode "Generic Driver", which offers an open plugin architecture for arbitrary and separately distributable virtual network implementations
• Host-only Networking: fixed host crash in kernels prior to 2.6.29
• New Networking Mode UDP Tunnel: allows to interconnect VMs running on different hosts easily and transparently, see the manual for more information
• Experimental support for SATA hard disk hotplugging available with VBoxManage
• Solaris hosts: New Crossbow based bridged networking driver for Solaris 11 build 159 and above

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

• VMM: more SMP timer fixes
• VMM: fixed sporadic recompiler crashes with SMP guests
• VMM: many small fixes
• GUI: when reverting to a snapshot, ask for taking a snapshot of the current state
• GUI: added a View menu
• GUI: added a setting for the promiscuous mode policy for internal networks, bridged networks and host-only networks
• GUI: added slider for setting the CPU execution cap allowing to limit the amount of CPU time spent for the execution of the guest, see the manual for more information.
• GUI: the VM description is editable during the runtime of a VM (bug #1551)
• GUI: added proxy settings (bug #2870)
• GUI: made the number of SATA ports configurable
• GUI: decrease time before showing the VM configuration dialog
• VBoxManage: more convenient configuration of storage controller attachments by automatically determining the port or device parameter when a storage controller has only one port or device per port
• VBoxManage: changed syntax of the guestcontrol command group, fixed various bugs, removed obsolete options
• VBoxBalloonCtrl: new service for automatic dynamic adjustment of the balloon size for running VMs
• Settings: machine names and snapshot names are not allowed to be a valid UUID
• Settings: provide better diagnostics if a single medium is used twice in a VM configuration
• Settings: provide better diagnostics for errors in medium create/merge/clone operations, and fix memory leaks in error cases
• Storage: ATA/SATA drives can be marked as non-rotational, i.e. the guest OS will detect them as a SSD if supported, which can improve performance
• Storage: virtual CD/DVD images will be detached if the guest ejects the medium, unless the drive is marked to handle ejects only on a temporary basis
• Storage: the medium UUID can be changed again when attaching a medium for the first time, which allows using images which are exact duplicates including the UUID
• Storage: fixed possible data corruption under certain circumstances with VHD and Parallels images (bug #9150)
• Storage: fixed unnecessary expansion when cloning differential images in VDI format
• Storage: fixed detection code to handle empty files for VDI and VMDK format
• Storage: fixed access to CD/DVD images beyond 4GB when using the SATA controller (bug #8592)
• Floppy: several bugs have been fixed
• Floppy: make it possible to unmount a host floppy disk (bug #6651)
• BIOS: disk-related structures are now checksummed correctly (bug #8739)
• USB: many fixes for the Windows USB host driver
• NAT: reduced memory footprint
• Networking: fixed the problem with segmentation offloading when several VMs are transmitting in parallel
• Networking: workaround for a bug in wireshark when operating directly on a capture file created by VirtualBox
• Serial: announce the serial devices in the ACPI tables to make Windows guests find the virtual hardware (bug #7411)
• VRDP: support for TLS connections (see the manual for more information)
• VRDP: support for multimonitor client configurations with MS RDP clients
• VRDP: fixed a rare screen corruption
• 3D support: fixed GL_VERSION string for different locales (bug #8916)
• Webservice: fixed timeout handling with HTTP 1.1 keepalive, and be more robust when connections fail
• VBoxSVC: fixed regression when several clients trigger autostart simultaneously
• Main: fixed incorrect handling of the medium location for media which are not file based (e.g. iSCSI), which resulted in confusing location values in many places
• JAX-WS client bindings: fixed resource leak
• Sources: fixed USB 2.0 support using extension packs for non-official builds
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed non-VT-x mode on Lion hosts
• Windows hosts: fixed copy'n'paste in the GUI and for the VM window (bug #4491)
• Windows hosts (64-bit only): enabled removing of all mediums when removing a VM
• Windows hosts (64-bit only): enabled live snapshot deletion
• Windows hosts: use native controls in the installer (bug #5520)
• Solaris hosts: fixed preemption issue with Solaris 11 hosts (builds 166 and above)
• Solaris hosts: better control of USB device access on Solaris 11 hosts
• Guest Additions: improved driver installation on Windows guests
• Guest Additions: fixed high CPU usage while executing guest programs from the host
• Solaris Additions: fixed automounting of shared folders (bug #8014)