In late August, Oracle He launched the first beta version of the next "major" update to its software for creating and running virtual machines. Major in quotes, because they themselves took it upon themselves to say that it was mostly a maintenance update. The number jump there seems more pure marketing, since it will be the first version to officially support Windows 11. Back to stable, now available VirtualBox 6.1.38.
Arriving six months after the previous stable version, and which introduced support for Linux 5.18 and Linux 5.19, VirtualBox 6.1.38 has introduced initial support for Linux 6.0. Full support is currently impossible, as Linux 6.0 is now under development. Similarly, this update introduces initial support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1, which is yet to come, initial support for Python 3.10, which has been around for a long time, and for kernels that use the Clang compiler.
Other new features of VirtualBox 6.1.38
This point release includes updates for Linux hosts and the Guest Additions installer to improve the mechanism for checking for the presence of the systemd init system in the distribution. On the other hand, the integrated recording function has been improved by adding an option to better define the names of the recorded files and overwriting an old .webm file if it was already present. Also fixed a regression that could cause the VBoxSVC server to fail to start under certain circumstances.
VirtualBox 6.1.38 can now be downloaded from its official website, available here. In this link there is a tutorial that explains how to install it on Linux. Although the most advisable thing is to wait for our distribution to add the new packages, something that can take more or less depending on its philosophy and development model. The release date of v7.0 remains unknown.