VirtualBox Should Have an SLIC Passthrough Mechanism => Fixed in SVN

[Tom Gelinas]

When Windows 7 or Vista are exposed to major hardware changes, their license validation ("Product Activation") is revoked. If a natively-installed Windows 7 OS is run in VirtualBox via "raw hard disk access" VMDK, the user is left with 30 days to reactivate. With Windows XP, this could be avoided by using different "hardware profiles" for either bare-metal or virtualized environments. Windows 6.0+ is better at hardware detection and has no hardware profile feature.

A workaround for this problem uses System Locked Preinstallation (SLP): ​https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/System_Locked_Preinstallation SLP is used to activate Windows on most OEM computers, and is less affected by hardware changes. Windows remains activated so long as a computer's BIOS has an SLIC string that corresponds with certain Windows license keys. This effectively binds the Windows license to a specific model of computer, similar to the method Apple uses to ensure OS X can only be run on Apple hardware.

Common Windows licenses allow the use of Windows both virtually and physically on the same hardware. Considering that VBox is able to run OS X given the presence of certain strings in BIOS ("ourhardworkbythesewordsguared..."), it would make sense for this type of feature to be extended to Windows. Windows licensing could even be afforded more protection than OS X, because there is currently no interface to to manually supply an SLIC key to VirtualBox while any string could be added to a VM's DMI.

A machine's SLIC can be read in Linux via /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/SLIC It's already possible to add it using a hex editor. Offering to relay a real SLIC seems like a fair compromise.

[Technologov]

Hmmm... very interesting know-how. +1.

-Technologov

[Tom Gelinas]

​http://vbox.innotek.de/pipermail/vbox-dev/2008-May/000643.html This thread contains discussion between Dr.-Ing. Frank Mehnert and patch submitters. It contains patches for VBox 1.6 that allowed one to specify an SLIC using environmental variables. VBoxMange would be a more appropriate method.

[Matt Behrens]

There are viable patches to add SLIC support here: ​https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=43678&p=196535&hilit=slic#p196535

I've used these patches and the contents of the SLIC table (available at /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/SLIC) to successfully use my OEM license of Windows 7 in a VirtualBox installation under Ubuntu instead of on the bare hardware.

I've PM'd the author to encourage him to submit them for inclusion.

[Matt Behrens]

Just for an update, patches were submitted to vbox-dev:

https://www.virtualbox.org/pipermail/vbox-dev/2011-December/004892.html

[Frank Mehnert]

The patches were applied a while ago and will be available with the next major release.

[Frank Mehnert]

The patch is part of VirtualBox 4.2.0.