Advanced Configuration and Power Interface, an industry specification for BIOS and hardware extensions to configure PC hardware and perform power management. Windows 2000 and higher as well as Linux 2.4 and higher support ACPI. Windows can only enable or disable ACPI support at installation time.

Advanced Host Controller Interface, the interface that supports SATA devices such as hard disks. See Sectioná5.1, “Hard disk controllers: IDE, SATA, AHCI”.

The hardware virtualization features built into modern AMD processors. See Sectioná1.2, “Software vs. hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V)”.

Application Programming Interface.

Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller, a newer version of the original PC PIC (programmable interrupt controller). Most modern CPUs contain an on-chip APIC ("local APIC"). Many systems also contain an I/O APIC (input output APIC) as a sperate chip which provides more than 16 IRQs. Windows 2000 and higher use a different kernel if they detect an I/O APIC during installation. Therefore an I/O APIC must not be removed after installation.

Advanced Technology Attachment, an industry standard for hard disk interfaces (synonymous with IDE). See Sectioná5.1, “Hard disk controllers: IDE, SATA, AHCI”.

Microsoft Component Object Model, a programming infrastructure for modular software. COM allows applications to provide application programming interfaces which can be accessed from various other programming languages and applications. VirtualBox makes use of COM both internally and externally to provide a comprehensive API to 3rd party developers.

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. This allows a networking device in a network to acquire its IP address (and other networking details) automatically, in order to avoid having to configure all devices in a network with fixed IP addresses. VirtualBox has a built-in DHCP server that delivers an IP addresses to a virtual machine when networking is configured to NAT; see Chapterá6, Virtual networking.

Enhanced Host Controller Interface, the interface that implements the USB 2.0 standard.

Graphical User Interface. Commonly used as an antonym to a "command line interface", in the context of VirtualBox, we sometimes refer to the main graphical VirtualBox program as the "GUI", to differentiate it from the VBoxManage interface.

See UUID.

Integrated Drive Electronics, an industry standard for hard disk interfaces. See Sectioná5.1, “Hard disk controllers: IDE, SATA, AHCI”.

See APIC.

Internet SCSI; see Sectioná5.5, “iSCSI servers”.

Media Access Control, a part of an Ethernet network card. A MAC address is a 6-byte number which identifies a network card. It is typically written in hexadecimal notation where the bytes are separated as colons, such as 00:17:3A:5E:CB:08.

Network Address Translation. A technique to share networking interfaces by which an interface modifies the source and/or target IP addresses of networking packages according to specific rules. Commonly employed by routers and firewalls to shield an internal network from the Internet, VirtualBox can use NAT to easily share a host's physical networking hardware with its virtual machines. See Sectioná6.4, “Network Address Translation (NAT)”.

Physical Address Extension. This allows accessing more than 4 GB of RAM even in 32-bit environments; see Sectioná3.7.1.2, “"Advanced" tab”.

See APIC.

Preboot Execution Environment, an industry standard for booting PC systems from remote network locations. It includes DHCP for IP configuraiton and TFTP for file transfer. Using UNDI, a hardware independent driver stack for accessing the network card from bootstrap code is available.

Remote Desktop Protocol, a protocol developed by Microsoft as an extension to the ITU T.128 and T.124 video conferencing protocol. With RDP, a PC system can be controlled from a remote location using a network connection over which data is transferred in both directions. Typically graphics updates and audio are sent from the remote machine and keyboard and mouse input events are sent from the client. VirtualBox contains an enhanced implementation of the relevant standards called "VirtualBox RDP" (VRDP), which is largely compatible with Microsoft's RDP implementation. See Sectioná7.4, “Remote virtual machines (VRDP support)” for details.

Serial ATA, an industry standard for hard disk interfaces. See Sectioná5.1, “Hard disk controllers: IDE, SATA, AHCI”.

Small Computer System Interface. An industry standard for data transfer between devices, especially for storage. See Sectioná5.5, “iSCSI servers”.

A Universally Unique Identifier -- often also called GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) -- is a string of numbers and letters which can be computed dynamically and is guaranteed to be unique. Generally, it used as a global handle to identify entities. VirtualBox makes use of UUIDs to identify VMs, Virtual Disk Images (VDI files) and other entities.

Virtual Machine -- a virtual computer that VirtualBox allows you to run on top of your actual hardware. See Sectioná1.1, “Virtualization basics” for details.

See RDP.

The hardware virtualization features built into modern Intel processors. See Sectioná1.2, “Software vs. hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V)”.

The eXtensible Markup Language, a metastandard for all kinds of textual information. XML only specifies how data in the document is organized generally and does not prescribe how to semantically organize content.

Mozilla Cross Platform Component Object Model, a programming infrastructure developed by the Mozilla browser project which is similar to Microsoft COM and allows applications to provide a modular programming interface. VirtualBox makes use of XPCOM on Linux both internally and externally to provide a comprehensive API to third-party developers.