Oracle announced the release of a new version of its popular open-source virtualization solution, VirtualBox 6.1.34. The latest version comes with various improvements and bug fixes, but most importantly, it also supports Linux kernel 5.17. VirtualBox 6.1.34, the 17th maintenance release in the series, supports Linux 5.17 kernel for Linux guests and hosts. It means it allows users to run GNU/Linux distributions with Linux kernel 5.17 inside virtual machines and allows installing VirtualBox on Linux 5.17 distributions.
Linux kernel 5.17 support
The latest version also supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 kernels in Linux Guest Additions. VirtualBox 6.1.34 also enhances its Linux 5.14 kernel series support, both for guests and hosts.
The team also enhanced the VBoxManage component, improving its ability to better handle incomplete quotes. It also comes with a new –ipv6-prefix option to set the IPv6 prefix and –ipv6-default to advertise the default IPv6 route. Changelog:
- VMM: Fix instruction emulation for “cmpxchg16b”
- GUI: Improved GUI behavior on macOS Big Sur and later when kernel extensions are not loaded
- EHCI: Addressed an issue with handling short packets
- Storage: Fixed a potential hang during disk I/O when the host I/O cache is disabled
- NVMe: Fixed loading saved state when nothing is attached to it
- DevPcBios: Addressed an issue that resulted in rejecting the detected LCHS geometry when the headcount was above 16
- virtio-scsi: Improvements
- E1000: Improve descriptor handling
- VBoxManage: Fixed handling of command line arguments with incomplete quotes
- VBoxManage: Improved ‘natnetwork list’ output
- VBoxManage: NATNetwork: Provide an option (–ipv6-prefix) to set IPv6 prefix
- VBoxManage: NATNetwork: Provide an option (–ipv6-default) to advertise default IPv6 route
- VBoxManage: Fix documentation of “usbdevsource add”
- Networking: General improvements in IPv4 and IPv6 area
- OVF Import: Allow users to specify a different storage controller and/or controller port for hard disks when importing a VM
- Unattended install: Improvements
- Shared Clipboard: Improved HTML clipboard handling for Windows host
- MacOS host: Fix handling of non-ASCII characters in the guest control functionality
- Linux host and guest: Introduced initial support for kernel 5.17
- Solaris package: Fixes for API access from Python
- Solaris IPS package: Suppress dependency on libpython2.7.so.
- Linux host and guest: Fixes for Linux kernel 5.14
- Linux Guest Additions: Fixed guest screen resize for older guests which are running libXrandr older than version 1.4
- Linux Guest Additions: Introduced initial support for RHEL 8.6 kernels
- Windows guest: Make driver install smarter
- Solaris guest: Addressed an issue which prevented VBox GAs 6.1.30 or 6.1.32 from being removed in Solaris 10 guests
- EFI: Fixed booting from FreeBSD ISO images