Available now for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows

Dec 19, 2015 08:30 GMT  ·  By

On December 18, 2015, Oracle announced the release of a new stable update for its powerful, cross-platform and open-source virtualization software, VirtualBox 5.0.12, for all supported operating systems.

Looking at the changelog, attached at the end of the article for reference, it appears that VirtualBox 5.0.12 is a quite important release as it adds numerous improvements in various areas, including, but not limited to, GUI, XHCI, 3D, BIOS, webcam, EFI, audio, and shared folders.

Of course, there are also enhancements specific to an operating system, such as multiple Windows hosts fixes, Linux hosts and guest fixes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2, a few minor Mac OS X hosts improvements, as well as several changes to Linux Additions.

But let's take a closer look at the general changes for all supported OSes, as VirtualBox 5.0.12 promises to fix the validation of IPv6 port-forwarding rules, the wrong mouse scrolling behavior in the virtual machine selector window, as well as the Ctrl+Break key sequence scan codes.

Moreover, the first-run wizard is now suppressed when the user inserts a CD/DVD media via the selector interface, the handling of the text selection mouse pointer was improved, and several XHCI issues were patched, including the broken emulation when using software virtualization.

EFI fix for Windows 10 guests

In addition to the changes mentioned above, VirtualBox 5.0.12 has better EFI support for Windows 10 guests, adds LBA64 support to its BIOS so that you can boot from huge disk drives, there are various audio fixes, along with various other small improvements to host services, shared folders, webcam, ExtPack and 3D.

VirtualBox 5.0.12 is considered an update to the previous version, VirtualBox 5.0.10, and it can be downloaded for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from our website. More details can be found in the release notes or the project's website. After the update, don't forget to also upgrade the Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack and VirtualBox Guest Additions ISO.