>>> 2) vboxmanage can be used to customize the dmi strings, meaning that >>> "innotek GmbH" and "VirtualBox" may not even appear in the dmidecode
I see you caught and corrected my typo with GmgH/GmbH. Sorry about that. > 80ee:beef is the graphics device. While the graphics device probably won't > change, unless we decide to change the vendor id at some point, I think the > VirtualBox VMM device that the guest additions talks to (and VT-x currently > relies upon for real-mode emulation) would be a slightly better choice for > identifying the VirtualBox hardware. The PCI VendorID:DeviceID for this > device is 80ee:cafe. Thank you for the info. I guess the PCI device is still there, even if the guest additions are not installed...hadn't thought of that. That might work out nicely to identify VirtualBox. While it seems the pci device route is most likely the best one, it is unfortunate from a 3rd-party application point of view: it means that we need a list of possible virtualization software, and which devices can be found on which VM. VMWare uses one thing, VirtualBox something else, etc. Means that all software that wants to try and detect virtualization (for whatever reason, and I know this is a controversial topic) will need to keep a list of which devices represent which virtualization package. When I started looking into this in December I thought perhaps there would be an easy way to identify when running on bare metal versus virtualized. I had remembered seeing the infamous "red pill" code from years before, though I had not kept up with the state of things since. What I hadn't realized is that as the holes were discovered over the past 6 years (red pill, no pill, etc.) I guess virtualization software has worked to fill them in. Makes sense in retrospect. The other thing I didn't know is if there was a common or loosely-agreed-upon "back door" mechanism that virtualization products all implemented, the way VMWare did with what is known today as the "Jerry" code -- I/O on port 0x5658. Looks like this is not the case. I've documented all of the different techniques I found on this page: http://charette.no-ip.com:81/programming/2009-12-30_Virtualization/index.html Unless someone has a better idea, I'll start coming up with a list of which PCI devices to look for indicating the presence of virtualization. Stéphane _______________________________________________ vbox-dev mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev
