14 DAY TRIAL // Oracle announced the release and immediate availability of VirtualBox 5.1.24 as the latest and most advanced version of the open-source and cross-platform virtualization software.
Nearly three months in development, VirtualBox 5.1.24 comes with a lot of improvements and bug fixes, in particular for users of GNU/Linux distributions. First off, it introduces initial support for the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel series, whose development was kicked off last Saturday by Linus Torvalds.
Additionally, VirtualBox 5.1.24 reduces the kernel stack consumption for Linux kernels that are compiled with the CONFIG_CPUMASK_OFFSTACK option, improves compatibility with Linux kernel modules that are built with the GCC 7 compiler, and addresses a couple of issues with the Linux 4.12 kernel series.
2D video acceleration now available for older GNU/Linux distributions
In some more great news for GNU/Linux users, it looks like the VirtualBox 5.1.24 release finally makes 2D video acceleration available for older distributions, improves support for the Fedora 25 and Fedora 26 operating systems that use 3D pass-through, and improves dynamic resizing with Oracle Linux 6 with UEK4.
On newer GNU/Linux distributions, VirtualBox no longer depends on the net-tools package, which is deprecated in favor of iproute, and it no longer prompts users to remove the Linux Additions packages installed from the official repositories of their favorite GNU/Linux distro if they are updated to Oracle's guidelines.
VirtualBox 5.1.24 also comes with more fixes for loading shared libraries, on both GNU/Linux and macOS platforms, as well as support for emulating more SSE2 instructions, better support for the latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop environments, and various under-the-hood performance improvements.
You can study the full changelog attached below if you're curious to know what exactly was changed in the VirtualBox 5.1.24 release, which you can download right now for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems through our web portal, or directly from the official homepage of the application.