[SOLVED] Qemu KVM ACPI Table Patch

[FastLaneJB]

Trying out Proxmox 4.2 currently. Great work by the way, the new interface makes it look so much more slick.

When passing a SLIC table using the -acpitable switch the oem_id is not correctly set so Windows refuses to activate. From what I've found on researching this Debian have built the patch into their version of Qemu but it's not made it into upstream yet.

Is there any chance of including the following patch into Proxmox?

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.qemu/387508

This would allow the ability to virtualise physical OEM Windows servers and allow them to still be activated inside Proxmox as long as the hardware is the same.

 

[fireon]

Installed last week an OEM (win2012 essentials). Works with the right entries in SMBIOS Settings. Hope i understand you right.

 

[FastLaneJB]

Installed last week an OEM (win2012 essentials). Works with the right entries in SMBIOS Settings. Hope i understand you right.

I suspect you mean an OEM HP type ISO which checks that it's only booted on their hardware but the activation key is just a normal retail one. It's not the same thing.

Or are you saying you used a combination of an acpi slic table and SMBIOS settings to achieve this? If you didn't specify a SLIC table however then it's not an OEM activation key that you used.

 

[LnxBil]

I also a slictable on a Dell with Windows 8 Home and it worked. I also had to manually copy the system uuid, which is not 1:1 forwarded from host to guest.

 

[fireon]

I suspect you mean an OEM HP type ISO which checks that it's only booted on their hardware but the activation key is just a normal retail one. It's not the same thing.

Sorry, yeah, i mean'd that.

 

[FastLaneJB]

OK so neither of these are what I am talking about. Windows 8 doesn't use a SLIC table like Server versions of Windows do either.

If you see the SLIC table fails because the values aren't matching and no changing the SMBIOS settings solves this. It needs the patch I posted adding to Qemu for it to work.

 

[LnxBil]

What program do you use for that (from the screenshots)?

 

[FastLaneJB]

What program do you use for that (from the screenshots)?

It's called SLIC Toolkit. Using v3.2.

Seeing as there's a pre-written patch for this it wouldn't be much of a big deal to add it to Proxmox. I guess I could see if I could patch their source myself (I'm not a dev) but it would mean each time they update Proxmox I'd end up having to recompile the Qemu package myself with my patch. Be much better if they included it in their package.

Without this Qemu doesn't meet the MS SLIC specification and it doesn't work. It seems a bit of a shame when they went so far to allow you to load a SLIC table in the first place that they don't finish it off so it works properly for Windows OEM Activation. This is still used in Server 2012 R2, it's only the client OS's where they moved away with Windows 8.

 

[LnxBil]

Thank you for the program.

Have you tried to mail to the pve-devel mailingliste? Maybe it gets included.

 

[fabian]

These patches are already included in the upcoming qemu 2.6.0 release.

 

[FastLaneJB]

Ah excellent, that's even better. Hopefully that'll be out soon and rolled out into a Proxmox update.

Thanks for the info everyone.

 

[FastLaneJB]

I noticed that my Proxmox is on Qemu 2.6.1 now. Not sure when it updated but I tried this again and just want to confirm it works correctly now.