[vbox-dev] vm detection

[Stéphane Charette]

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 12:09, Larry Finger <Larry.Finger at lwfinger.net> wrote:
> For my edification, why does it matter?
>

Some extra installation steps we have to run when our appliance is
deployed in a virtual environment.  I was hoping to have a single
easy-to-run check which can help determine between native and
virtualized environments.

Unless someone has an easier solution, I've decided to run
/usr/sbin/dmidecode and grep for certain keywords to tell the
difference.  There are two problems I know about with doing it this
way:

1) greping for text strings isn't as "deterministic" as I'd like it to
be; running some instructions or calling some sort of API (if such a
solution existed) would make me feel a bit better

2) vboxmanage can be used to customize the dmi strings, meaning that
"innotek GmgH" and "VirtualBox" may not even appear in the dmidecode
output; in my opinion, this solution is about on-par with checking the
organizational unique identifier in the MAC address

Stéphane Charette