The Quest to Detect KVM QEMU - Part 1: The CPUID Instruction

This one is a little side quest I went on when trying to evade defender. After spending some time using Windows as my host I decided I wanted to go back to linux. Now I had a lab setup in HyperV but nothing of real importance so I decided to just start fresh this time (Using arch btw). Now something that had always attracted my attention is VM detection. I previously had a VFIO gaming setup which meant I was able to pass through a GPU and some other components directly to my VM giving it near native performance. This setup was great however the main downside was that you still couldn’t play majority of competitive games because they would detect the VM and stop it all there. Interestingly enough there were always people who claimed to have bypassed this but it was always kept pretty hush hush as the methods woulds be patched. ...

July 24, 2025 · 6 min