VirtualBox 7.1: This is a major update, here’s what’s new
VirtualBox is a full virtualizer for x86 hardware designed for servers, desktops, and embedded systems. VirtualBox 7.1 introduces an enhanced user interface, cloud VM management, ARM support, Wayland compatibility, and more.
New features in VirtualBox 7.1
This is a major update. The following new features were added:
- GUI: Modernized look and feel, offering a selection between Basic and Experienced user level with reduced or full UI functionality
- OCI Integration: Performance dashboard now shows resource usage for cloud VMs
- OCI Integration: Clone compute instances
- OCI Integration: Reset compute instances
- Oracle VirtualBox Extension Pack: Update to the PUEL license, removing the evaluation option.
- VRDE: If a user does not set up TLS with custom certificates, enable it with self-signed certificate, including issuing a new one before the old one expires
- NAT: New engine with IPv6 support
- macOS/Arm host: Arm virtualization for Linux and BSD VMs
- Linux host and guest: Added Wayland support for Clipboard sharing
- Shared Clipboard: Added initial support for transferring files on Linux and Windows hosts / guests. This requires the 7.1 Guest Additions to be installed. See User Guide for known limitations
- Screen Recording: Performance improvements for the encoding pipeline, resulting in less CPU usage while recording is active. This requires 7.1 Guest Additions to be installed on Windows guests
Fixes and additions
In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:
- VMM: Fixed EFLAGS.TF handling for CPUID instructions when Hyper-V is being used
- virtio-net: Follow up fixes for FreeBSD 12.3 and pfSense 2.6.0
- EFI: Ability to add new Microsoft DB/KEX certificates to newly created VMs
- Oracle Extension Pack: Fixed shipping the cryptographic support module for full VM encryption
- GUI: Improved overall accessibility
- GUI: Update the version of Qt used
- Unattended Installation: Added support for subiquity- / cloud-init-based installers; this enables installing more modern Linux-based guest OSes in Unattended mode
- Unattended Installation: Added support for specifying separate passwords for the user and admin / root accounts
- VBoxManage: Added ability to show and (re-)attach to a (video) recording progress of a VM
- VBoxManage: Added the ability to query the guest’s mount points via a new “mount” Guest Control sub command. Requires at least 7.1 Guest Additions
- Python: Our API bindings for Python 2.x is now marked as being deprecated and will be removed in a future version. Please upgrade your code to use Python 3
- VBoxShell: Lots of smaller and bigger bugfixes + Python 3.x compatibility
VirtualBox 7.1 is available as a free download here.