VirtualBox Should Have an SLIC Passthrough Mechanism

[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.