VirtualBox 4.0 Beta 1 Brings Major Changes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VirtualBox 4.0 Beta 1 Brings Major Changes

It was more than six months ago that Oracle released Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2, formerly known as Sun's VirtualBox, as their most recent major update. Oracle now, however, is readying a very major VM VirtualBox 4.0 update. Today they have released the first public beta of Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.0 and it brings many new features along with some changes that may prove to be another disappointing step by Oracle in alienating the open-source community...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODg3Ng

[FireBurn]

Your article seems a bit biased. What licence are these extra packages released under?

Have you thought that maybe they've been separated out to allow for quicker fixes to these specific components without having to release a whole new version?

This doesn't mean I condone what Oricle is doing with the rest of Sun btw

[AnorexiasGrizzli]

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

[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.

[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.

[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

[cruiseoveride]

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

[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.

[R3MF]

does virtual box support IOMMU?

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

[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.