VirtualBox 3.0 reaches stable release

[aidanjt]

Ready for Virtual SMP, DX8/9, and OpenGL2.0 acceleration?

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

* Guest SMP with up to 32 virtual CPUs (VT-x and AMD-V only; see chapter 3.7.2.2 of the user manual)
* Windows guests: ability to use Direct3D 8/9 applications / games (experimental; see chapter 4.8 of the user manual)
* Support for OpenGL 2.0 for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

* Solaris hosts: allow suspend/resume on the host when a VM is running (bug #3826)
* Solaris hosts: loosen the restriction for contiguous physical memory under certain conditions
* Mac OS X hosts: fixed guest PAE
* Linux hosts: kernel module compile fixes for 2.6.31 (bug #4264)
* VMM: fixed occasional guru meditation when loading a saved state (VT-x only)
* VMM: eliminated IO-APIC overhead with 32 bits guests (VT-x only, some Intel CPUs don’t support this feature (most do); bug #638)
* VMM: fixed 64 bits CentOS guest hangs during early boot (AMD-V only; bug #3927)
* VMM: performance improvements for certain PAE guests (e.g. Linux 2.6.29+ kernels)
* VMM: some Windows guests detected a completely wrong CPU frequency (bug #2227)
* VMM: fixed hanging and unkillable VM processes (bug #4040)
* VMM: fixed random infrequent guest crashes due to XMM state corruption (Win64 hosts only)
* VMM: performance improvements for network I/O (VT-x/AMD-V only)
* GUI: added mini toolbar for fullscreen and seamless mode (Thanks to Huihong Luo)
* GUI: redesigned settings dialogs
* GUI: allow to create/remove more than one host-only network adapters (non Windows hosts)
* GUI: display estimated time for long running operations (e.g. OVF import/export)
* GUI: fixed rare hangs when open the OVF import/export wizards (bug #4157)
* 3D support: fixed VM crashes for client applications using incorrect OpenGL states
* 3D support: fixed memory corruption when querying for supported texture compression formats
* 3D support: fixed incorrect rendering of glDrawRangeElements
* 3D support: fixed memory leak when using VBOs
* 3D support: fixed glew library detection
* 3D support: fixed random textures corruption
* VRDP: support Windows 7 RDP client
* Networking: fixed another problem with TX checksum offloading with Linux kernels up to version 2.6.18
* NAT: fixed “open ports on virtual router 10.0.2.2 - 513, 514” (forum)
* NAT: allow to configure socket and internal parameters
* NAT: allow to bind sockets to specific interface
* PXE boot: significant performance increase (VT-x/AMD-V only)
* VHD: properly write empty sectors when cloning of VHD images (bug #4080)
* VHD: fixed crash when discarding snapshots of a VHD image
* VHD: fixed access beyond the block bitmap which could lead to arbitrary crashes
* VBoxManage: fixed incorrect partition table processing when creating VMDK files giving raw partition access (bug #3510)
* VBoxManage: support cloning to existing image file
* OVF: several OVF 1.0 compatibility fixes
* OVF: fixed exporting of disk images when multiple virtual machines are exported at once
* Virtual mouse device: eliminated micro-movements of the virtual mouse which were confusing some applications (bug #3782)
* Shared Folders: sometimes a file was created using the wrong permissions (2.2.0 regression; bug #3785)
* Shared Folders: allow to change file attributes from Linux guests and use the correct file mode when creating files
* Shared Folders: some content was incorrectly written under certain conditions (bug #1187)
* Shared Folders: fixed incorrect file timestamps, when using Windows guest on a Linux host (bug #3404)
* X11 clipboard: fix duplicate end of lines (bug #4270)
* X11 guests: a number of shared clipboard fixes
* Linux guests: Guest Additions support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11
* Linux guests: new daemon vboxadd-service to handle time synchronization and guest property lookup
* Linux guests: implemented guest properties (OS info, logged in users, basic network information)
* Windows host installer: VirtualBox Python API can now be installed automatically (requires Python and Win32 Extensions installed)
* USB: Support for high-speed isochronous endpoints has been added. In addition, read-ahead buffering is performed for input endpoints (currently Linux hosts only). This should allow additional devices to work, notably webcams (bug #242).
* USB: fixed error handling for some USB dongles
* Web service: fixed inability to handle NULL pointers for object arguments, which are valid values for a lot of APIs, in both the raw and the object-oriented web service.
* Web service: object-oriented bindings for JAX-WS did not exhibit interface inheritance correctly, fixed
* Web service: added support for IDisplay and IGuest interfaces, which were previously unavailable
* Registration dialog uses Sun Online accounts now

I'm downloading it now. I'll report back after I've had a bit of a fiddle. But it does look like a very impressive release.

[aidanjt]

Ok, a couple of quirks, to get D3D accel. working, you need to have to adjust the virtual machines options to enable 3D accel., install the Guest Additions in Windows safe mode, then enable 3D accel. driver during Guest Additions installation. For some reason the machine locks up if you try a reboot from the Guest Additions end options, instead, do a manual shutdown. And Fallout 3 just locked up when I tried to run it, so it's pretty crappy, but it should do for Windowed 3D apps, Google Earth ran fine for e.g..

On VBoxed Linux, desktop effects 'works' fine, but with some minor bugs. Glxgears only gives about 60 or so fps, worse than software rendering. So I'm not going to bother with it any further than that.

Ah well, hopefully 4.0 will be more polished off in the 3d department. As for everything else, they've definitely seemed to have fixed a number of highly annoying bugs where you can't kill off hung VBox processes. That's very much welcomed. So overall, VBox is more usable now.