Oracle has released version 5.0 of its type-2 virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. Starting with a public beta in April this year and some more test builds and a release candidate later the product is now released. Oracle also already released an update (version 5.0.2.) containing some fixes for version 5.0 already.
There are known problems with VirtualBox 5.0.2 on Windows 10 hosts and with Windows 10 guests. Some of the problems are fixed in the most recent test build which can be found here.
Version 5.0 provides the following new features:
- Paravirtualization support for Windows and Linux guests to improve time-keeping accuracy and performance (see the manual for more information)
- Make more instruction set extensions available to the guest when running with hardware-assisted virtualization and nested paging. Among others this includes: SSE 4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, AVX-2, AES-NI, POPCNT, RDRAND and RDSEED
- xHCI Controller to support USB 3 devices (see the manual for more information)
- Drag and drop support (bidirectional) for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests
- Disk image encryption (see the manual for more information)
- VMs can now be started in separate mode. The VM process is started headless while the frontend runs as a separate process which can be terminated without stopping the VM.
- GUI: VM guest-content scaling support (including 3D acceleration)
- GUI: New User Interface settings page for customizing status-bar, menu-bar and guest-content scaling
- GUI: New Encryption settings tab for customizing encryption options for disk images
- GUI: HiDPI support including application icons and optional unscaled HiDPI output on Mac OS X (including 3D acceleration)
- GUI: Hotplugging support for SATA disks
- New, modular audio architecture for providing a better abstraction of the host audio backends
- Support for the NDIS6 networking framework on Windows (default on Vista and later)
For a complete overview of what’s new and what is fixed see the change log.