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Comment by kookamamie | Hacker News Reader

Windows suffers from similar effects when Virtualization-Based Security is active.

At the same time VBS is one of the biggest steps forward in terms of Windows kernel security. It's actually considered a proper security boundary.

Funny that they called it VBS.

That's not something I'd easily associate with a step forward in security.

Hypervisor overhead should be low, https://www.howtogeek.com/does-windows-11-vbs-slow-pc-games/

What kind of workloads have noticeably lower performance with VBS?

It was measured to have a performance impact of up to 10%, with even higher numbers for the nth percentile lows: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-vbs-harms-performa...

Overhead should be minimal but something is preventing it from working as well as it theoretically should. AFAIK Microsoft has been improving VBS but I don't think it's completely fixed yet.

BF6 requiring VBS (or at least "VBS capable" systems) will probably force games to find a way to deal with VBS as much as they can, but for older titles it's not always a bad idea to turn off VBS to get a less stuttery experience.

VBS requires hyper-v to be enabled and it "owns" the CPU virtualization hardware so I can't use VMware workstation which is very annoying.

VMWare Workstation [0] (and I thought VirtualBox - though I can't find any official docs [1]) should be able to use the Hyper-V hypervisor via WHP.

QEMU can also use WHP via --accel whpx.

[0] - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/virtualization/vmwa...

[1] - https://www.impostr-labs.com/use-hyper-v-and-virtualbox-toge...

As a network engineer I mainly like VMware workstation because of its awesome virtual network editor that lets me easily build complex topologies but it doesn't work when you use Hyper-V.

It works indeed, but the performance drop is quite drastic.

Same. Have to disable VBS for VirtualBox, and it gets more and more obscure with each update because some features like Windows Hello force it back on.

BF6 requires this? Is there any official article/link about this? Thank you!

The closest so far (I don't know the specifics of VBS vs. Secure Boot):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44805565 Secure Boot is a requirement to play Battlefield 6 on PC

> It's the Javelin Anti cheat system which forces the use of secure boot

Thanks! I've found this https://www.reddit.com/r/Battlefield/comments/1mebjom/tpm_20...

We're working on HPC / graphics / computer-vision software and noticed a particularly nasty issue with VBS enabled just last week. Although, have to be mentioned it was on Win10 Pro.

This most likely comes from IOMMU - disable it.

That’d break a lot of GPU setups

Only if you want to virtualize it or have vms, for VBS it simply disables hardware pcie memory space isolation. (With IOMMU on, each pcie device gets an isolated memory buffer).

Anything that runs on an ISA that has certain features has these effects, IIRC.

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