[HN Gopher] Windows 11 on Raspberry Pi 4
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Windows 11 on Raspberry Pi 4
        
       Author : murkle
       Score  : 68 points
       Date   : 2021-06-30 16:39 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | shadilay wrote:
       | I wonder if MS will enforce the TPM requirement in the hobbyist
       | space, like the RPi, or if ending the PC as an open platform is
       | more important.
        
       | rntksi wrote:
       | Is that a native build for ARM that's running? Impressive.
        
         | flatiron wrote:
         | yes arm64, the twitter thread also said they didn't have to do
         | any TPM tricks, it just worked. i read somewhere else only the
         | installer now requires TPM, the OS boot does not, but that will
         | change when it goes gold
        
           | sixothree wrote:
           | I got Windows 11 via Windows Update for my Surface Pro 3. I'm
           | pretty sure it only has TPM and not TPM 2.0.
        
           | mnouquet wrote:
           | There was a post yesterday about someone installing it on a
           | recent machine and then swapped the drive to an older
           | allegedly "unsupported" old machine and it worked just fine.
           | YMMV.
        
           | monocasa wrote:
           | I wouldn't be surprised if the ARM builds don't require a
           | TPM, and they kick the can down the road WRT requiring
           | equivalent functionality on ARM. TPMs are very, very x86. For
           | instance that LPC bus they sit on is almost electrically the
           | 8086 front side bus, just with a tiny state machine in front
           | to serialize it (hence LPC: Low Pin Count 8086 Bus).
           | 
           | There's of course equivalent security processors and domains
           | on pretty much every ARM application soc, but the exact
           | semantics of them (like pretty much everything in the ARM
           | space that's outside of the actual CPU core complexes) is
           | extremely heterogeneous. They might even be running in EL3 on
           | the application cores themselves. Wrangling all of that is
           | probably out of scope for W11 RTM.
        
             | dstaley wrote:
             | The preview builds of Windows 11 don't enforce the TPM
             | requirement.
        
               | monocasa wrote:
               | Sure, I'm talking about even the RTM build for ARM which
               | is the first non preview ARM build. They've said that
               | final builds will require TPMs, but I'm making the
               | argument that there's a good chance this will only apply
               | to x86 and won't apply to ARM builds.
        
           | rntksi wrote:
           | That's pretty interesting.
           | 
           | Going off on a tangent here, but thinking of how most of the
           | world ran Windows XP/Windows 7 on cracked versions, would it
           | be possible that following the TPM requirement, someone would
           | write a TPM emulator (or maybe some more clever hack) so that
           | Windows 11 doesn't complain about those stuffs and just
           | install/boot? (disclaimer: I have no idea how TPM works and
           | have never had to use it...)
        
             | salamandersauce wrote:
             | From what I've heard W11 in a VM won't require a TPM to
             | install. So worst case install it to your HDD from
             | VirtualBox and see what happens booting on bare metal?
        
               | mrlonglong wrote:
               | I installed the preview the other day and yes it works
               | just fine under VirtualBox
        
             | shadilay wrote:
             | As long as it's not validated via the unique manufacturers
             | key in the TPM it's possible. Any other software/website
             | will assume you have a working TPM if you are running Win11
             | and will likely break however so the experience will be
             | somewhat unusable.
        
               | zamadatix wrote:
               | Outside of the native OS modules using it for security
               | (e.g. Windows Hello) I can't see many apps having a use
               | for TPM let alone breaking. Perhaps DRM content will move
               | towards using it at some point but it's always been a
               | circus to get high tier DRM solutions to validate on
               | Windows anyways, most just fallback to low validation
               | with lower quality streams as is.
        
             | qbasic_forever wrote:
             | It's probably easier and more likely that software crackers
             | will patch out the TPM requirement and make pirate versions
             | of Windows 11 that install without it.
             | 
             | Emulating a TPM at the hardware level is possible but too
             | much work when you can just buy the chips themselves--they
             | aren't some magic unobtanium locked down thing, for
             | example:
             | https://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/trusted-
             | platfor...
             | 
             | The problem is to get an old system to use it you'd have to
             | also modify its bios to make it aware of the TPM (and
             | figure out how to get access to the phsyical bus the TPM
             | needs to interface with the motherboard). There is a lot of
             | reverse engineering and work to do that sort of thing.
        
               | merb wrote:
               | > Emulating a TPM at the hardware level is possible but
               | too much work
               | 
               | good for us that amd does it for free, huh?
               | https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/pro-security (fTPM)
        
         | MrBuddyCasino wrote:
         | I have to admit that I'm puzzled why people are loosing their
         | shit when an operating system that is built to run on an ARM
         | device turns out to run on one of the most popular ARM devices
         | in existence. Why?
        
           | qbasic_forever wrote:
           | There is no retail version of Windows for ARM. It only comes
           | pre-installed on ARM devices, or through some partner channel
           | when you form a business deal to sell ARM devices. Last I saw
           | the current way to get Windows on ARM was by extracting it
           | from an old Windows IoT project build. So it's novel and
           | interesting when someone figures out how to work around all
           | these roadblocks to get Windows working on a consumer ARM
           | SBC.
        
             | electroly wrote:
             | Maybe that was true previously but these days you can just
             | download a disk image for Windows ARM ready-to-go from
             | https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-
             | download/windowsins...
        
               | [deleted]
        
           | orra wrote:
           | Especially given Windows NT, back when it was called that,
           | was portable, and supported various RISC processors.
        
             | dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
             | And this is what I hope ReactOS will become one day, in
             | spite of Microsoft's FUD campaigns.
        
             | edoceo wrote:
             | When working on Win2k it started off still trying to
             | support MIPS and PPC but then shipped only x86 and Alpha
        
               | krylon wrote:
               | I thought Win2k on the Alpha was cancelled, too, although
               | they made a Beta. There was an article posted here on HN
               | recently from 1999 about Microsoft cancelling Win2k on
               | Alpha.
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27603531
               | 
               | (Sorry for being a smartass about it.)
        
           | FartyMcFarter wrote:
           | The fact that it runs without hacks or fiddling with drivers?
        
         | gruez wrote:
         | AFAIK windows 10 already had official raspberry pi builds, so
         | it's not too surprising.
        
           | krylon wrote:
           | They seem to be forever trailing far behind Microsoft's
           | system, though. What version are they targetting now, 2003R2?
           | Windows 7?
           | 
           | It would be very interesting to see what happened, though, if
           | a bunch of companies / government organizations would pool
           | their resources to fund ReactOS development, if only to put
           | the screws on Microsoft when negotiating new licenses. Like
           | IBM mainframe customers putting Amdahl swag on their desks
           | when negotiating with IBM salespeople to get a discount.
           | 
           | If they achieve 100% compatibility, there could also be a
           | significant market for a Windows-compatible system that will
           | support device drivers and software written for old versions
           | of Windows. In my last job, we had a number of customers
           | still running Windows XP on SCADA boxes, because they needed
           | to support some piece of hardware whose vendor had either
           | gone out of business or stopped supporting that hardware, so
           | XP was the last version of Windows with drivers available to
           | support that hardware.
           | 
           | One customer in particular still ran _MS-DOS_ on a few
           | machines for similar reasons - the vendor of their SCADA
           | system had gone out of business ... a long time ago, it
           | seems, and they were very reluctant to migrate to something
           | more recent. It was really weird, because as I remember, some
           | of these machines did not run DOS, but some ancient version
           | of QNX running several virtual DOS machines for visualization
           | stuff.
           | 
           | (Okay, I'm rambling. I should lay off the coffee.)
        
         | conradev wrote:
         | You can download ARM builds with the click of a button if you
         | have an MSDN subscription. If you don't have one (I don't),
         | there is a great website to download Windows update images
         | directly from Microsoft (and turn them into ISOs):
         | 
         | https://uupdump.net
         | 
         | I downloaded a Windows 10 ARM64 ISO, loaded it into Parallels
         | on my M1 MacBook Air, put in my product key, and it works
         | great!
         | 
         | (now, if only Visual Studio could be compiled for ARM64...)
        
       | jmkni wrote:
       | Nice, looks like it's installable on the M1 Mac as well if you
       | are running Windows 10 via Parallels.
       | 
       | Interestingly, there's a message which says:
       | 
       | > Your PC does not meet the minimum hardware requirements for
       | Windows 11. Your device may continue to receive insider preview
       | builds until Windows 11 is generally available, at which time it
       | is recommended to clean install Windows 10
       | 
       | I'm guessing that's at least partly a TPM issue. However, it's
       | downloading ok via Windows Update.
       | 
       | I wonder what the future of Parallels is. Windows ARM runs
       | surprisingly well on it, but it's a Preview build as well, as MS
       | haven't released it as a stand alone product.
        
       | null4bl3 wrote:
       | This is an abomination
        
       | ourmandave wrote:
       | Yes, but to come full circle, can you run Doom on Windows 11
       | running on a Rasberry Pi 4?
        
         | spicybright wrote:
         | A vm running 10, then a vm in that running 7, then vista, xp,
         | ... until you can't do VMs anymore. Then you run doom.
        
           | krylon wrote:
           | Can amd64 do nested virtualization? (I suppose you could use
           | Bochs, but the resulting performance would be awful.)
           | 
           | I remember reading that IBM mainframes running VM can do
           | that, there was this story about some developers stacking
           | nested VMs about six or seven levels (without much loss of
           | performance).
           | 
           | There also was another story involving Hercules, a mainframe
           | emulator. Someone had an IBM mainframe running Linux inside a
           | VM, running Hercules on the Linux VM, which in turn ran VM
           | again, with a machine running Linux, which in turn ran
           | Hercules... I'm very fuzzy on the details, but it was a crazy
           | setup.
        
         | sixothree wrote:
         | or wsl?
        
       | ThrowawayR2 wrote:
       | The installation procedure is documented by the same person at
       | the link in the tweet (https://miyagadget.tokyo/archives/274) and
       | Google Translate manages to produce an intelligible translation.
       | Seems to be a straightforward process.
        
         | I_Byte wrote:
         | Try using https://deepl.com. I usually get better results than
         | google translate with this site.
        
         | jmkni wrote:
         | I imagine you just install Windows 10 ARM, join the insider
         | program and run Windows Update? Is there anything more to it?
        
       | brundolf wrote:
       | > Where did you stick the TPM chip
       | 
       | Lol
        
       | geerlingguy wrote:
       | On YouTube, user leepspvideo posted a full demo of it working and
       | how he got it installed here:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLb0d7zTsRY
       | 
       | Seems like it runs fine with any ARM64 software, though a bit
       | slow since the CPU isn't very beefy.
        
       | jordemort wrote:
       | Is it sad that I'm mostly excited about this because I want an
       | easy and supported way to run Android apps on a Pi 4?
        
         | CarelessExpert wrote:
         | I take it Linux + Anbox can't do the job?
        
           | jordemort wrote:
           | I haven't have a great deal of success with Anbox
        
       | xony wrote:
       | Looks like emulation
        
       | jll29 wrote:
       | I don't need Windows 11 - I have had X/11 (aka The X Window
       | System, Version 11) for a while, which supported mice with 16
       | keys already in the last millennium.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-06-30 23:02 UTC)