What I want to do on my laptop:
Develop and Run on windows with Visual Studio (CUDA, TensorRT,...)
Develop and Run on Linux (CUDA, TensorRT,...)
Environment to edit videos, photoshop,...
Play games
Environment for general use (web browser, outlook, word,...)
Environment to test applications
Possibly connecting some external GPU to offload the work (cuda,...) from my laptop's graphics card. Since I'm new to this, I haven't researched enough to understand how it can be done. But, this is in my plans.
What I did and reaserched:
As a start, I created VM environements in my host Windows OS using VirtualBox for #1 and #2, but I cannot run inside VM, since it doesn't provide access to graphics card. Even if it did, I still need somehow to switch to a different environment when I want to play games for example.
I probably need hypervisor type 1 if I want to have environment to play games? But, in this case I'll need a second laptop to access it, right?
Is this even possible to do on one laptop (I have strong laptop with enough RAM and SSD)
Graphics cards (GPU) are PCI devices, so they can be passed to VMs with PCI Passthrough. A device is not accessible to the host during passthrough. Hot plug can be used to reattach a graphics card to a different VM or the host without rebooting.
I don't know if a Windows host supports GPU passthrough (maybe you need Windows Server), but Linux host and Windows guest seems to work.
Setting this up is easier if you have a second GPU that remains attached to the host or another computer to control the host during GPU passthrough, for example via SSH.
Related
Step by step:
My PC has connected printer via USB (I know VID:XXXX and PID:YYYY)
I took image of my PC and put inside virtual machine (VMWare)
Of course image on my VM doesn't has connected USB-printer (because real printer is connected to my real USB-port on my real PC).
One program is running and checking accessibility of printer by check connection with the printer via USB (I don't know how exactly - maybe via WMI, maybe via other way).
Results:
a) on my real PC this program works
b) on image doesn't work
QUESTION: is possible to emulate on VM-side that USB-port (VID:XXXX and PID:YYYY) is alive?
Thanks.
P.S. I don't want to install USB-redirect-via-TCP or similar approach.
You should switch to the QEMU emulator and to Linux to do that. VMWare probably doesn't support this of thing especially in a Windows environment.
If you are already on Linux, QEMU has hardware emulation of the xHCI and you can assign the host USB devices to KVM (read here: https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/USB_Host_Device_Assigned_to_Guest).
On Windows, I don't think this will be possible.
I am using VmWare Workstation 14 and when I install an operating system (any of them) some programs and apps are able to identify that I am using a virtual machine.
I have seen the vm is using virtualized devices that are really named virtual. like for example VmWare Network Card or etc. Is there any way to install fake real like hardware drivers on these virtual machines? Can this simple change make the app see this vm as a real machine?
How to make this virtual machine appear as a real machine to applications?
Is there really any way?
This was asked as a yes-or-no question so my answer is:
Yes... probably. But it's a lot of work.
There's a 2006 presentation by Tom Liston and Ed Skoudis that talks about this: https://handlers.sans.org/tliston/ThwartingVMDetection_Liston_Skoudis.pdf
It focuses on VMware, but some of it would also apply to other types of Virtual Machine Environments (VMEs).
In summary, they identify as many things as they can find that would allow VM detection, which would each have to be addressed, and they also mention some VMware-specific mitigations for them.
VME artifacts in processes, file system, and/or Windows registry. These would include the VMtools service and "over 50 different references in the file system to 'VMware' and vmx" and "over 300 references in the Registry to 'VMware'", all of which would have to be deleted or changed.
VME artifacts in memory. Specific regions of memory tend to be different in guests (VMs) than hosts, namely the Interrupt Descriptor Table (IDT), Global
Descriptor Table (GDT), and Local Descriptor Table (LDT). The method by which the VM is built may allow these to appear the same in guests as they do in hosts.
VME-specific virtual hardware. This would include the drivers you mention like VmWare Network Card. The drivers would have to be removed or replaced with drivers that do not match the names or code signatures of any virtual drivers. Probably easiest to do on an open-source system, simply by modifying the driver source code and build.
VME-specific processor instructions and capabilities. Some VMEs add non-standard machine language instructions, or modify the behaviour of existing instructions. These can be changed or removed by editing the VME source code, at the cost of convenient host-guest interaction.
VME differences in behaviour. A VM might respond differently on the network, or fail at time synchonization. This could be mitigated with additional source code changes (on both host and guest) to make the network traffic look closer to normal, and providing sufficient CPU cores to the VM would help make sure it does not run more slowly than wall clock time.
Again this is from 2006, so if anyone has a more up-to-date reference, I'd love to see their answer.
How is it possible to determine the commands to operate a usb device, if that device comes from another operating system and traffic monitoring software cannot be installed on that OS. The only method i can think of is sending random commands to the device, until the device responds, but this seems implausible for more complex commands, and potentially dangerous. For example, consider the DualShock 4 controller. Sony has not made an official driver for this device, so what method can i use to create a linux driver for it?
Get a hardware protocol analyzer. Then you won't need to install any software on the host or device under test. Here is one that I have used:
http://www.totalphase.com/products/beagle-usb12/
I have VMware workstation 9 and 10, and I am wanting to use that to run some integration tests.
Using the vmrun utility, I can copy scripts to and run them on the virtual machine guests. However, some of the integration tests will require interfacing with USB devices.
Is there any way using vmrun, or any of the vmware API's to programmatically control the "Removable Devices" to connect and disconnect USB devices to virtual machines?
I have tried looking at the readVariable and writeVariable commands, however I cannot find any useful information on that subject.
vmrun has no facility to passthrough USB devices from the host to the guest and vice versa (source, VMware employee). There are though 2 options to achieve this behavir
A) Use autoconnect: look here and here on how to modify the .VMX file to auto connect the USB device to the guest VM. Basically you need to add usb.autoConnect.device0 = "vid:XXXX pid:XXXX" to it.
B) Use askConnection: When you plugged in the device to the host, and the VM is powered on, you can select to connect the device to the VM and remember the choice. Then the next time when you pluggin the device again, the device will be automatically connected to the remembered VM. Also, you can configure in Edit > Preferences > USB for other choices. Currently, this feature only works when you plug in the device.
I'm trying to do mobile application development (BlackBerry, Android) on a virtual machine. My idea is that no matter what desktop I'm on I can open a remote connection to the virtual machine and have my mobile development environment ready. The problem is that I would like to deploy code to the mobile device as if it were physically connected to the virtual machine. Ideally the devices will be plugged in to the client machine that is creating the remote connection.
I'm currently using VMWare workstation to manage my virtual machines, I've done a bit of research to see what the best solution for connecting my usb devices over the network is.
There are a multitude of pricey USB over network solutions that may or may not work for what I'm trying, but I would like to avoid those. I would be interested in a free open source solution where both the usb host and usb client are windows machines. This is close to what I am looking for http://usbip.sourceforge.net/, but you can't host a device from Windows.
It appears that I may be able to do this with a Hyper-V VM and RemoteFX through Microsoft RDC, but I would like this to work on my existing VMWare VM.
The quickest solution I've found is a network usb hub that would allow me to connect the devices over the network, but this would force me to be attached to the hub which is a problem if more people come on my project.
Ideally I'm looking for an existing software solution to my problem. Any suggestions?
Also can anyone confirm this would work in Hyper-V using RemoteFX?
I would consider porting your VM over to VirtualBox from Sun (now Oracle) they have remote USB support out-of-the-box, and are very stable.
I've ported machines the other way (for work) and it's not difficult.