Inside The Windows Vista Kernel: Part 3
Adelaida Frodge
Recent versions of Virtualbox have support for accelerating OpenGL inside guests. This can be enabled with a simple checkbox in the machine's settings, right below where video ram is set, and installing the Virtualbox guest additions. However, most Windows games use Direct3D (part of DirectX), not OpenGL, and are thus not helped by this method. However, it is possible to gain accelerated Direct3D in your Windows guests by borrowing the d3d libraries from Wine, which translate d3d calls into OpenGL, which is then accelerated. These libraries are now part of Virtualbox guest additions software.
Virtual machine EFI boot files will refer to different disks than the ones in the physical EFI partition, so VirtualBox must not make use of the latter but instead of a EFI partition inside a dedicated virtual disk. This disk can be created with the following command:
The esp.vmkd disk should be labeled as disk 0 due to the fact that was attached to the SATA port 0, 512MB in size and unpartitioned. The windows.vmdk disk should be labeled as disk 1; note that the column "Size" displays the disk size, not the partition one.
Now close the command prompt, power off the virtual machine and detach the Windows installation disk (from "Preferences > Devices" remove the optical disk). The virtual machine should now boot from the newly installed boot partition and load the physical Windows installation. It may show some UEFI related errors on the top of the virtual machine window and the first boot may take a while, but if everything has been done correctly you will be able to access your windows installation.
This works the same way as #Run a native Windows installation inside VirtualBox but the vmdk will contain the entire disk rather than one partion, and so you will not need to create a separate ESP or MBR partition as the one in the physical disk will be used.
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