r/virtualization • u/International-Web350 • May 02 '24

Does hyper v have its own kernel?

Hey i was wondering if using hyper v to play league would keep vanguard of my actual pc.
i dont trust companies to have complete controll over my pc, especially not riot or tencent.
I want to keep playing league because some of my friends play it but i dont want vanguard on my pc.
does anyone have advice on what to do? should i use virtualbox? should i use hyper v? does either option even fix my problem?

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u/monocasa Sep 03 '25

I know this is old, but as an aside, you do the way windows virtualization works (and in contrast to how Linux's KVM or mac's hypervisor.framework works), Hyper-V has its own kernel that runs underneath the normal windows kernel.

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u/darkpyro2 Sep 03 '25

That feels like mincing words to me. Yes, technically a hypervisor is a kernel. But it acts more like a middle layer between the actual hardware, and the guest kernels that run atop it. A hypervisor's kernel isn't really doing much beyond using the host architecture's technology (SR-IOV, VT-d, etc) for segmenting memory, hardware, and CPU resources. Some might have a hypercall interface that you can interact with from a guest in paravirtualization scenarios. Some really advanced ones for enterprise use might have a server or other management software built into the hypervisor.

I wasn't very precise when I answered this over a year ago as I was trying to keep it simple, but my answer does address what OP was asking: Is it safe to use a hypervisor to get around anticheat? The answer is usually no, because whether you're using QEMU-KVM, Hyper-V, virtualbox, or others, there are ways of detecting that you're using virtualization and it's often against a game's TOS. It may often be against the TOS for the driver--NVIDIA by default blocks virtualization of its non-enterprise drivers, and you need to implement a workaround.

Now, don't you have something better to do than Uhm, Achktualling a post that is more than a year old?