On Tue, 2013-01-22 at 08:02 -0700, Greg Woods wrote:
On Tue, 2013-01-22 at 12:12 +0100, Reindl Harald wrote:
one reason more to have one priamry OS and use virtualization for anything else
There are some cases where this doesn't work. One I know of is commercial games under Windows. Some of them just do not work when Windows is running in a VM.
I have been told (and I don't know if it's true but it makes sense) that this is because of copy protection. The game CD has some stuff written beyond the "end" of the disc. Low-level system calls can read this, but a normal user space disc copy doesn't, so the software can tell when it loads whether or not this is the original CD or a copy. Since the hypervisor doesn't implement reading beyond the end of the disc, the games won't load even with the original CD when running in a VM.
I would have thought that correct emulation would allow those same low-level calls in a VM. AFAIK the guest system can read the whole CD as a raw device (assuming appropriate privileges).
As I said, I don't know if this explanation is correct, but I do know that some of my games will not load when running in a VM, so I have to have a native Windows boot.
One reason for some games not working is that they require a better graphics card than the one emulated by the VM.
poc