Skip to end of banner
Go to start of banner

windows-arm64 VM using qemu-system

Skip to end of metadata
Go to start of metadata

You are viewing an old version of this page. View the current version.

Compare with Current View Page History

« Previous Version 3 Next »

This page describes the process to run a windows-arm64 VM using qemu-system-aarch64.

Prerequisites

Windows ISO

Microsoft does not distribute official ISO for windows-arm64.

UUPDump website allows you to build an iso from windows update servers. Pick most recent version of windows 11 (avoid “Cumulative update”). Select professional version. https://uupdump.net/known.php?q=22h2+arm64

Then you can download the iso using a script shell. Some dependencies are needed, and the tool will guide you to report those that are missing.

You should obtain a file named like “XXXXX.X_PROFESSIONAL_ARM64_EN-US.ISO”.

In our example, latest version is 22621.1.

Virtio drivers

Virtio windows drivers (https://github.com/virtio-win/virtio-win-pkg-scripts/blob/master/README.md) are needed to make your disk recognized by windows. Pick latest iso from link above.

In our example, latest version is 0.1.229.

EFI

Download latest EFI from https://packages.debian.org/sid/qemu-efi-aarch64 . This will be used to boot windows image. Download package from “all” link, and extract it using:

ar x qemu-efi-aarch64*.deb
tar xvf data.tar.xz
mv ./usr/share/qemu-efi-aarch64/QEMU_EFI.fd .

Create disk

qemu-img create win11-arm64.img 100G

Check

You should now have those files available in current folder:

  • 22621.1_PROFESSIONAL_ARM64_EN-US.ISO

  • virtio-win-0.1.229.iso

  • QEMU_EFI.fd

  • win11-arm64.img

Run QEMU

qemu-system-aarch64 \
  -M virt,virtualization=true -m 8G -cpu max -smp 8 \
  -bios ./QEMU_EFI.fd\
  --accel tcg,thread=multi\
  -device ramfb \
  -device qemu-xhci -device usb-kbd -device usb-tablet \
  -nic user,model=virtio-net-pci \
  -device usb-storage,drive=install \
  -drive if=none,id=install,format=raw,media=cdrom,file=./22621.1_PROFESSIONAL_ARM64_EN-US.ISO \
  -device usb-storage,drive=virtio-drivers \
  -drive if=none,id=virtio-drivers,format=raw,media=cdrom,file=./virtio-win-0.1.229.iso \
  -drive if=virtio,id=system,format=raw,file=./win11-arm64.img

Setup Windows

Setup will take between 1 and 2 hours on a high end x64 processor. It requires several manual steps.

Enter setup

Click on QEMU window and press enter when this appears

Click on next and install now.

Bypass checks

Click next until you reach this screen

  • No labels