Has it been a year since VirtualBox 6.0 release already? Time flew! This week brought us the first major release of the VirtualBox 6.x family, with lots of improvements – traditionally focus is on performance and stability.

VirtualBox 6.1 Changelog

Looking at the official changelog for VirtualBox 6.1, I can see the following as very welcome changes:

• Implemented support for importing a VM from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – VirtualBox 6.0 previously introduced exporting VMs into the same cloud – this is now a complete workflow
• New style 3D support (VBoxSVGA and VMSVGA) – old style using VBoxVGA is gone
  • Support YUV2 and related texture formats with hosts using OpenGL (macOS and Linux), which accelerates video playback when 3D is enabled by delegating the color space conversion to the host GPU
• Virtualization core: recompiler is gone, meaning full CPU hardware virtualization is required now
• Support for nested hardware-virtualization on Intel CPUs
• vboximg-mount: Experimental support for direct read-only access to NTFS, FAT and ext2/3/4 filesystems inside a disk image without the need for support on the host – sounds like you can use Windows to run a VM that would access Linux filesystems on attached storage – pretty cool!

I’m quite happy with Parallels Desktop on my macOS systems, but install VirtualBox among the first 5 apps on any Linux laptop or desktop. Have upgraded to 6.1 on my Dell XPS already, will post more screenshots soon!

See Also

• VirtualBox
• VirtualBox 6.0
• HW Virtualization

Turns out, VirtualBox 6.0 was released on December 18th, 2018.

Looking at the release notes I have found the following intersting features that I’ve yet to try:

VirtualBox 6.0

• Nested virtualization – avaialbe only on AMD CPUs for now – this allows you to install a hypervisor like KVM or VirtualBox inside a VirtualBox guest VM – this still needs hw virtualization.
• Hyper-V support – apparently, VirtualBox will detect if it’s running on a Windows server with Hyper-V activated, and will use Hyper-V as virtualization engine – albeit, it might run slower than native VirtualBox or Hyper-V guest VMs
• Moving stuff – both disk images and VM metadata can now be moved very easily to a new location
• Closing VMs improved – there’s now an option to keep the same hardware UUID when closing a guest VM
• FUSE mount for vdisk images – on Mac OS hosts it’s possible to use a vboximg-mount command for raw access to the virtual disks

I’ve updated my VirtualBox software page with the above notes and will be testing features and sharing.

See Also

• VirtualBox 6 beta 2
• How To: Fix X11 fonts when SSH X11 Forwarding