Following three betas, Oracle and the VirtualBox developers have released version 4.1 of their open source desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware. The latest stable release comes seven months after Oracle released VirtualBox 4.0 and includes a number of new features.

VirtualBox 4.1 introduces support for cloning virtual machines (VMs), raises the memory limit for 64-bit hosts to 1 TB and includes an enhanced wizard for creating new virtual disks, as well as a new wizard for copying virtual disks. Experimental changes include WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) graphics driver support for Windows guests and the addition of PCI passthrough support for Linux hosts, which allows the Guest OS (VirtualMachine) to 'passthrough' the hypervisor and directly access physical hardware, such as a PCI ethernet card, improving overall performance.

Other changes include graphical user interface (GUI) updates, such as an enhanced wizard for creating or copying virtual disks, and fixes for a number of bugs affecting, for example, 3D support, TLS connections and the Windows USB host driver. In the GUI, users can now change MAC addresses of virtual machines when being cloned or imported, change networking properties during runtime and configure the SATA controller port count. A new networking mode, UDP Tunnel, has also been added that allows users to interconnect VMs running on different hosts.

More details about the major update can be found in the change log – at the time of writing, an official release announcement has yet to be made. VirtualBox 4.1 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris; documentation is also provided.

Both the base Oracle VM VirtualBox product source code and the binary are licensed under the GPLv2, while the Extension Pack mechanism, which allows third-party sources to add their own add-on functionality, is licensed under the PUEL.

(crve)