VirtualBox updates stable and beta versions

The VirtualBox developers at Oracle have updated the stable version of VirtualBox with version 4.0.12 and the 4.1 beta with a third pre-release version. The 4.0.12 update is a maintenance release which fixes more issues for Mac OS X hosts in preparation for the release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion; it also corrects a preemption issue on Solaris 11 and fixes the SATA controller to allow access to CD/DVD images over 4GB. Details of the other fixes in 4.0.12 are listed in the change log. VirtualBox 4.0.12 is suitable for production use and is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris.

The VirtualBox 4.1 Beta 3 release also contains fixes for last week's beta 2 which had added PCI passthrough support to the open source virtualisation system. In this case, the fixes include one for a regression introduced by the PCI passthrough enhancement. Other changes include the ability, in the GUI, to change MAC addresses of virtual machines when being cloned or imported, change networking properties during runtime and configure the SATA controller port count. Beta 3 also has the same fix for CD/DVD images greater than 4GB that 4.0.12 has. VirtualBox Beta 3 is not suitable for production use, but for testing and evaluation; it is also available to download from the web site.

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.

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