Would installing an OS on an external ssd and booting into that to run pirated software while blocking access to other drives in your system or physically unplugging them be one way?
Or are there better ways to isolate the software you run and use as much as possible?
A virtual machine would be relatively safe most of the time.
What are the risks involved? Because of the “relatively”
How is the performance impact these days for games compared to running natively?
Not great but better than it used to be. Don’t do a GPU passthrough.
What’s wrong with GPU passthrough?
GPU passthroughs can expose the host to a potentially compromised VM.
Interesting, do you have more information on that? Because why is GPU passthrough a problem but not other PCI devices?
I don’t unfortunately. This is from a conversation I had with a researcher in VM escape.
As far as I’m aware peripherals are not actually passed through exactly but rather emulated on the guest machine. When you pass through a peripheral you’re only passing the input of that device, data is not sent upstream.
Whereas passing through the GPU you’re providing a means of accessing non-emulated devices through the hardware itself bypassing the isolation provided by virtualization entirely.
That’s true, but the IOMMU on your host is supposed to prevent any accesses outside of the group you passed in
As long as the GPU is the only thing in that IOMMU group, you’re reasonably safe
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