Passthrough hardcoded Windows license

[proxwolfe]

Hi,

my host comes with a hardcoded Windows license which is recognized automatically when installing Windows directly on the hardware.

Is it possible to expose the [whatever it is] where the license is installed to a VM so that Windows in the VM would also recognize it and activate automatically?

Thanks

 

[LnxBil]

I haven't done that in years, but "in the past", there was the SLIC, which can be extracted and presented also to the VM. It may involve faking a lot of hardware and rebranding them in the guest, but it may work.

The necessary information I used was this:

    cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/SLIC > slic_table
    dmidecode | grep -A8 'System Information' | grep -i UUID | awk '{print $2}'
    dmidecode | grep -A8 'System Information' | grep -i 'serial number' | awk '{print$3}'

The VM configuration has to include this

smbios1: uuid=AAA...BBB,manufacturer=Dell_Inc.,product=AABBCC,serial=AABBCCDD
args: -acpitable file=/path/to/slic_table

 

[ermanishchawla]

I haven't done that in years, but "in the past", there was the SLIC, which can be extracted and presented also to the VM. It may involve faking a lot of hardware and rebranding them in the guest, but it may work.

The necessary information I used was this:

    cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/SLIC > slic_table
    dmidecode | grep -A8 'System Information' | grep -i UUID | awk '{print $2}'
    dmidecode | grep -A8 'System Information' | grep -i 'serial number' | awk '{print$3}'

The VM configuration has to include this

smbios1: uuid=AAA...BBB,manufacturer=Dell_Inc.,product=AABBCC,serial=AABBCCDD
args: -acpitable file=/path/to/slic_table

Just try using hosts instead of kvm64 in the vm

 

[proxwolfe]

Thank you - worked perfectly.

For others that might want to do this as well:

Both lines of dmidecode gave me:

Invalid entry length (16). Fixed up to 11.​

(And some numbers)​

​

The numbers they gave me looked good anyway (and, more importantly, they worked).

And I replaced "Dell_Inc." with the name of my host's manufacturer. No idea whether that is relevant or not.