I've been working on this for the last few days. I've found a fix for this in linux (sorry, windows 8 is closed source). If you're feeling adventurous, you can edit the following linux kernel source file: arch/x86/kernel/cpu/common.c
find the function setup_smep().
comment out the body of the function and insert return; at the bottom (so you don't have any empty function).
compile and set up your bootloader. It worked for me.
Now getting parallels tools to install might be a different story... I'm having a ton of trouble getting parallels tools to work on kernel 3.4.3 (even after modifying the parallels tools source to get it to compile). I think I'll try an older version, maybe 3.2 something.
OR
you could wait for the parallels team to fix it on their own.
edit:
you can use ubuntu 11.04 because the kernel is old enough that it didn't implement SMEP. That is what I used to build the newer versions of the kernel.
edit 2:
recompiled with 3.2.21 and removing smep. Parallells tools installed just fine. Enjoy!
Last edited: Jun 22, 2012