Windows 11 Virtual Machine on ARM Linux
It's ready for beta testers. Please report good and bad results. Do not assume I am already aware of an issue, unless you can find it in Issues, in which case please comment with something like "I'm having this problem too."

What to expect:

A full Windows 11 ARM virtual machine on ARM Linux. Thanks to KVM, this uses virtualization instead of emulation, resulting in no significant speed difference compared to installing Windows directly.
A first-class setup experience. None of the usual sticking points are present here - everything is automated, even setup and debloating.
It uses network passthrough to the Linux network stack, so Ethernet and WiFi all work out of the box.
It uses audio passthrough to pipewire/pulseaudio/ALSA, so audio playback (and probably microphone input) works out of the box.
The VM uses less than 1GB of RAM and minimal CPU when not in use, leaving plenty of resources free for Linux applications.
The connect mode gives the VM access to files stored on Linux, and any changes are immediately synchronized.
It (will soon be) capable of USB passthrough, so any USB device can be made to directly communicate with Windows.
Thanks to Microsoft's built-in Prism emulator, all Windows applications should work. Compare that to Wine, which fails on everything but old, simple programs.
The graphics are snappy and quicker than you would expect, at least with the connect mode on Wayland. Youtube and lightweight web games are actually somewhat playable on the Raspberry Pi 5 without any overclocking or extra tweaks.

What not to expect:

A gaming rig. For now there is no graphics acceleration, so 3D features and WebGL won't work. That could change once somebody figures out virtualized graphics that talk to Vulkan. (see "Other Notes" below)

Get started:

git clone https://github.com/Botspot/bvm
bvm/bvm help

Click to see what BVM does on first run.

BVM will installl some dependencies. At the time of writing these are:

git jq wget genisoimage qemu-utils qemu-system-arm qemu-system-gui qemu-efi-aarch64 remmina remmina-plugin-rdp nmap wget yad uuid-runtime seabios ipxe-qemu wimtools

If you are on Arch or some other non-standard OS, you will need to install these manually. Hey Arch users: If you want to help out, consider changing the install_dependencies function in the bvm script to install dependencies, then send it to me in a Pull Request or something. I would love to support Arch but I don't use Arch.
If Debian Bookworm is detected, BVM will set up the bookworm-backports APT repository in order to upgrade QEMU from 7.2 to 9.2. Version 7.2 does work, but it is missing pipewire audio output support, and besides, we all know newer is always better anyway! If you have a good reason to not want bookworm-backports, please open an issue, explain why, and I may be willing to change this behavior.

BVM also makes some icon symlinks in ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps to set the GUI's taskbar icon, and to override the QEMU and FreeRDP taskbar icons. If this does not work on your distro, or if you do not like this feature, please get in contact with me.

Usage instructions

Read the help message and follow the instructions. BVM has simplified the VM-creation process to a tidy sequence of completely automated steps. Between each step you have the opportunity to change what is happening, modify the config file, retry a step, or do whatever else you want. Unlike some of my other scripts that have a slight "don't try to understand how it all works" philosophy, BVM encourages you to learn it, hack it, and add to it.

To get a fresh VM up and running, use a sequence like this:

bvm/bvm new-vm ~/win11
This makes a config file: ~/win11/bvm-config <--- Please read the config file!
bvm/bvm download ~/win11
This downloads Windows and necessary drivers.
bvm/bvm prepare ~/win11
This bundles everything up to get ready for first boot.
bvm/bvm firstboot ~/win11
If the Windows install is interrupted, just run this step again. Be aware: when Windows finishes installing, the VM will shutdown. All .iso files and the unattended folder could be removed once this step is done.
bvm/bvm boot ~/win11
Main command to use the VM. While this works, it's a little laggy and lacks crucial features. It is recommended to boot the VM headless and then connect to it via RDP. (keep reading)
Boot Windows headless, without a screen:
bvm/bvm boot-nodisplay ~/win11
Then in a second terminal, connect to the RDP service:
bvm/bvm connect ~/win11
The connect mode has:
- Better audio.
- Clipboard synchronization.
- File sharing. (Your home folder and any external drives are accessible from This PC)
- Dynamic screen resizing.
- Usually a higher frame rate.
- Disconnecting for 60 seconds will log out, allowing Windows to stay running but use negligable CPU and RAM. When you need to use Windows again, connecting will log back in. Splendid!
  Note: if it freezes on login, try connecting with Remmina instead of FreeRDP with the connect-remmina mode.
Mount the Windows main hard drive with:
bvm/bvm mount ~/win11
Direct file access can be useful for troubleshooting. Be aware: the VM needs to be shut down properly to mount in read/write mode.

Full list of modes: new-vm, download, prepare, firstboot, boot, connect, mount, help, list-languages, boot-nodisplay, boot-ramfb, boot-gtk, connect-freerdp, connect-remmina, gui
What is that last one there? Oh I almost forgot! ;-)
BVM has a graphical user interface.

Run the GUI with:

bvm/bvm gui

Right now it is quite basic, but functional. It might stay that way, might not. Much of BVM's future depends on how much of an impact it makes in the community. If nobody uses it, then I will leave it to rot as with past projects that I thought were cool but nobody else did.

Tips:

Use an ARM 64-bit Linux OS with the kvm kernel module enabled. This is a hard requirement.
Use Wayland. This is not a hard requirement, but it makes a big difference.
Use ZRAM. This is a must if you have a 1GB or 2GB Pi model. Instructions here.
Use Debian Bookworm or a new-ish Ubuntu image. Debian Bullseye may or may not work. If you try it, please let me know how it went. Maybe it works fine.
Your VM can be a folder anywhere, so it could be on an external SSD drive, or even network storage if you wanted. If you encounter issues with sparse preallocation, let me know and I can add a fallback case to do full preallocation.
Encounter an issue? Open an issue. Deal? Deal. :)

Other notes:

~~It seems to not be working on Raspberry Pi 4.~~ Now it should work after this commit. Now on devices without A76 CPU cores, Windows 11 version 22631.2861 will be downloaded instead of the most recent stable version. This ought to resolve things for the Pi 4 and likely the Pi 3.
If you have past experience with QEMU, I would like to ask for your ongoing help to help build out more features. Surely somebody will want to do serial passthrough, bluetooth passthrough, or something really specific that I will have no idea how to implement.
GPU driver: Full 2D/3D acceleration may be possible. First of all if you are Jeff Geerling and have a secondary GPU connected to your Raspberry Pi, in theory Windows could talk to it using GPU passthrough over PCIe. Maybe.
For everyone else, it may be possible using this unfinished series of PRs spanning multiple projects: virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows#943 Also see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/QEMU/Guest_graphics_acceleration#Virgil3d_virtio-gpu_paravirtualized_device_driver and this other route which may be more mature: https://github.com/tenclass/mvisor-win-vgpu-driver
If someone reading this is "actually good" with "real programming languages," (instead of only knowing shell script like me) feel free to compile it and check if it works on ARM. (And let the community know how it goes!)
USB passthrough is not quite working yet. The option is ready in the config file, but it will not work until I find an elegant way to change the ownership of USB devices to the current user, or run QEMU as root. This should not be hard.
One exciting possibility is the chance to break out individual windows programs and integrate them directly into the linux desktop, using a RDP mode called RemoteApp. See a screenshot of this here. Unfortunately it is very inconsistent right now, and I deemed it too unstable to include as a feature at the moment.

Ask me anything!

Who made this?
I'm Botspot, a college student, bash scripter, Raspberry Pi user, and founder of Pi-Apps and WoR-Flasher. If you met me in real life you would just see an average kid.
Is this legal?
Yes. By default the VM does use a license key, but it is a free license for VMs, offered by Microsoft for this purpose.
Is this unique?
Yes and no. Other projects share some similar ideas. The QuickEMU project probably comes closest, but it is not ARM-compatible. There is also the UTM project, which apparently has some level of ARM support. The most unique thing here, in my opinion, is the extent to which it is automated. I could string the main modes back to back, leave it running, and in a couple hours there would be a fully-installed VM ready to use.
Before this, you would need to watch over it and press a key in a 5-second time window to boot the installer, then navigate through the installation steps, deploy some registry workarounds, and debloat the OS later. BVM bypasses the keypress by patching the Windows installer ISO in a very unconventional way, (see the patch_iso_noprompt function), bypasses the installation steps and registry workarounds with an autounattend.xml file, and removes the bloatware as a final step. To my knowledge, nothing else can do all that without human intervention.
Why did you make this?
First, it will benefit me personally quite a bit over the long term. As a die-hard Raspberry Pi user without easy access to another computer, with BVM I now have an alternative to Wine when I need to run a Windows-only program, such as Lego Mindstorms or Microsoft Office. ARM Windows comes built-in with a x86 emulator, so any program will work, unless it require GPU features. Compare that to wine which is quite hit-or-miss.
But also, I genuinely want to help you all out. The ARM desktop community is special, but small. The more daily users we can keep around, the better the community can become for everyone. Some will oppose the promotion of a Microsoft product and say it defeats the point of FOSS. But for most folks, it's either Linux with compromise, or no Linux at all. Therefore I see tremendous value in all projects that lower the barrier to entry for a good Linux desktop experience.
What was the timeline for making this?
I have wanted to do a KVM Windows VM on a Pi ever since I was a high-schooler with a Pi 3, so 5+ years. The task is not trivial, and no good tutorials exist. Occasionally someone would get it working, but leave behind very incomplete instructions and not respond to questions. While I gave it a try every year or so, with partial success, I never "cracked" the code completely until this month (February 2025) when I made up my mind to figure it out. This has been a multi-week effort of near total dedication, with a number of all-night coding sessions. It became an obsession.
Sidenote: ChatGPT was indispensible, especially when it came to the obscure Windows automation stuff. Anyone who says LLMs are useless is wrong.

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