Those who like to try out the latest technologies should download VirtualBox (VBox) 3.0 Beta 1 that was released early this month. This release is not meant for production environments and intended only for early evaluation and testing purposes. Major features added to VBox:

• Guest Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) with up to 32 virtual CPUs (requires VT-x and AMD-V only)
• Windows guests: Experimental support for Direct3D 8 and 9 applications and games
• Support for OpenGL 2.0 graphics for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests

Other items fixed or added:

• Virtual mouse device: eliminated micro-movements of the virtual mouse which were confusing some applications (bug #3782)
• Solaris hosts: allow suspend/resume on the host when a VM is running (bug #3826)
• Solaris hosts: tighten the restriction for contiguous physical memory under certain conditions
• 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)
• GUI: added mini toolbar for fullscreen and seamless mode (Thanks to Huihong Luo)
• GUI: redesigned settings dialogs
• GUI: allow to create/remove one host-only network adapters
• 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)
• VRDP: support Windows 7 RDP client
• Networking: fixed another problem with TX checksum offloading with Linux kernels up to version 2.6.18
• VHD: properly write empty sectors when cloning of VHD images (bug #4080)
• VHD: fixed crash when discarding snapshots of a VHD image
• VBoxManage: fixed incorrect partition table processing when creating VMDK files giving raw partition access (bug #3510)
• OVF: several OVF 1.0 compatibility fixes
• 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: fixed incorrect file timestamps, when using Windows guest on a Linux host (bug #3404)
• 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
• NAT: allow to configure socket and internal parameters
• Registration dialog uses Sun Online accounts now

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