VirtualBox 7.2.0 Released with Video Decoding Acceleration for Linux Host

After 2 Beta and 1 RC testing releases, Oracle VirtualBox finally announced the new major 7.2.0 release.

VirtualBox 7.2.0 redesigned its main UI. Now, it has a left side-bar allowing to navigate between Virtual Machines, Extensions, Media, Network, Cloud, Resources, as well as Home to get started.

Besides UI changes, the released added video decoding acceleration for VMs running on Linux host, though you need to enable “3D Acceleration” in VM settings.

As I sometimes play few low-end Windows games, I tried running Windows 10 as a virtual machine in VBox 7.2.0 with the feature enabled. Sadly, the games still run in very poor performance just like before.

For computers and laptops with ARM processors (e.g., Apple Silicon, Snapdragon), VirtualBox 7.2.0 now supports running Windows 11 (ARM version) as virtual machines. And, ARM host with Windows now support virtualizing guest OSes in ARM architecture.

As well, it added guest additions support for Windows 11 on Arm, WDDM Graphics driver with 2D and 3D mode, and Shared Folder feature for Windows on ARM guest.

And, when using Hyper-V as virtualization engine, the release also added support the x86_64-v3 instruction set extensions and improved x86_64 and Arm CPU feature reporting.

On macOS Arm host, it added experimental 3D acceleration support using DXMT instead of the previous DXVK on top of MoltenVK. However, 3D acceleration is not supported on macOS hosts using Intel CPUs anymore.

For Linux, the new release introduced initial support for Kernel 6.16 and Kernel 6.17, added explicit unattended installation support for Oracle Linux 10, and fixed some bugs.

Other changes in VirutalBox 7.2.0 include:

• Fix Nested Virtualization feature on Intel CPUs.
• Global Shared Folder support for all VMs.
• ACPI support for ARM VMs.
• Improve keyboard LEDs handling in Soft Keyboard.
• Open-source the NVMe storage controller emulation.

For more about VirtualBox 7.2.0, see the changelog page.

Get VirtualBox 7.2.0

The installer packages for all supported platforms and extension package are available to download at the link below:

For Ubuntu, it provides the packages for Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, and 24.10. Ubuntu 25.04 user may choose download & install the 24.10 package.

In addition, if you run into “Guru Meditation” critical error issue when starting a VM using VirtualBox 7.2.0, try switching to an old Kernel which worked in my case in Ubuntu 24.04.