VirtualBox 4.0 Beta 1 Brings Major Changes

[Tgui]

Well, if it comes to it I'm sure there are some devs willing to work on open source counterparts to Oracles "packages".

[Kano]

Well USB 2.0 is not in OSE, but USB 1.1 works. So you can print directly which is the most usefull case when you want to use vendor provided tools for cd printing or so. The addon feature is basically great to give OSE users the full functionally of the PUEL versions before. I would usually prefer to use the official repository but that way the OSE is not as crippled as before. I am a bit sad about the EFI support. It's seems it is only tested with OSX, that's absolutely great... I would like to have got sandbox for EFI testing because with >2TB hds you have to boot from EFI without an extra boot hd. Let's see what happens before, getting a board with proper EFI support or VBox with full UEFI.

[Smorg]

vbox is GPL2. Fork it if you're so scared.

I agree 100%. Oracle would just be shooting themselves in the foot yet again by losing whatever open-source contributions were coming their way to a community fork that will inevitably diverge in incomparable ways. Fortunately Virtualbox has at least one perfectly competent fully open-source replacement whose development has been charging full speed ahead for longer than Virtualbox has been around.

If we have to fork, people will come out of the woodwork and support a community version. They always do. That said, this was a pretty pessimistic article (with good justification...) and let's hope there's eventually a few good exciting words to say before release.

[R3MF]

does virtual box support IOMMU?

and if it does, is this of any advantage to a desktop user?

[albatorsk]

hda emulation would be grrreat since virtualbox has problems with audio chunking out in many configurations with windows yadda guests, maybe they will get it right this time

That's been a problem for me since what seems like forever, but with the new HD Audio emulation sound finally works fine with no skipping, crackling or stuttering. Yay.

[cruiseoveride]

vbox is GPL2. Fork it if you're so scared.

[oneman]

hda emulation would be grrreat since virtualbox has problems with audio chunking out in many configurations with windows yadda guests, maybe they will get it right this time

[Shining Arcanine]

rdp was never part of the virtualbox-ose so i dont know whar you are talking about

As far as I know, none of these things were ever a part of virtualbox-ose.

In addition, the target market for VirtualBox is server virtualization and Oracle does not have any interest in doing business with home users, but does benefit from having them be testers. It would not make much sense for Oracle to begin charging home users for closed source components that they currently give away for free, so as you said, I do not see what the problem here is.

[not.sure]

Resizing of images is certainly a welcome addition (finally).

The fact that things like USB and RDP are still not integrated into the main version is indeed not a good sign for the future of virtualbox.

[AnorexiasGrizzli]

rdp was never part of the virtualbox-ose so i dont know whar you are talking about