The changing Fedora

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

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