Gleb Natapov wrote:
On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 04:07:33PM +0400, Arseny Klimovsky wrote:
Hello, in some cases Microsoft OEM licence can be used in virtual machine legally. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/licensing-datacenter.aspx For Windows 7 it is not clear, but possibly it is legal. To make in technically possible, one should use its ACPI SLIC table from original BIOS in virtual BIOS. I've created a patch for some versions (including latest stable), it can be easily cherry-picked in master. http://gitorious.org/seabios/seabios Of course, the patch does not include this SLIC table, only a code and place to put it.
Qemu support passing acpi tables to Seabios already using -acpitable option. It was added specifically to pass SLIC tables.
Yes, I argee, that such support should be made in qemu/kvm also, because this way one should recompile BIOS for adding SLIC.
But actually passing -acpitable is not enough for Windows OEM activation, in all tables oem_id and table_oem_id should match manufacturer. You can read about this here http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-kvm/2010/3/25/6260141/thread Now, no support for changing these fields, which are already inserted in BIOS. So, anyway one should recompile BIOS to have OEM activation working.
Anyway, even if such support is added, sometimes it is more convenient for user to add SLIC table to BIOS file. This way you should not think about this every time you change configuration in scripts/libvirt.
I think this feature is useful and easy to support, while it should not be enabled by default.
-- Klimovsky Arseny