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Windows on ARM

Windows 11 ARM on the first-party engine — what ships, what it needs from you, and why it is still labelled experimental.

Windows runs on the 1VM engine, the first-party Hypervisor.framework VMM. New Windows machines default to it, and there is nothing to download to make it work.

It is experimental, and that word is doing real work — see the honest state below.

1vm create win --guest windows --from-folder ~/Downloads/Win11 \
  --drivers ~/Downloads/virtio-win.iso
1vm start win

Run 1vm guide windows for the same facts printed against your Mac.

What ships

  • HVF virtual CPUs, an in-kernel GICv3 with a GICv2m MSI frame, PSCI, and ACPI tables (MADT, GTDT, MCFG, IORT, FADT, DSDT, DBG2) generated to match the configured hardware
  • An NVMe system disk and scoped xHCI USB — keyboard, tablet, mouse and installer media — all of which Windows has in-box drivers for
  • A TPM 2.0 device, which the Virtualization.framework fallback does not expose
  • ramfb, so Windows Setup is visible immediately without a display driver
  • Unattended install from prepared media
  • virtio-net networking once virtio-win's NetKVM driver is installed
  • Loopback TCP and UDP port forwarding over the first-party NAT stack

What you need to provide

  • A Windows 11 ARM64 ISO you have obtained and are licensed to use. This app never downloads, mirrors or activates Windows media.
  • The virtio-win ISO — Red Hat's, freely available — attached as the driver ISO. Networking depends on it.

The unattended install creates an administrator named user with no password. Set one after the first logon.

What does not work

  • DirectX, 3D and compute. The display is accelerated scanout, not a GPU.
  • More than one display. The console is a single head.
  • x86 Windows. The ISO must be ARM64.

The honest state

Windows on this engine is at tier N3: it installs and boots to a desktop. The N4 certification gates — clean install, full stop, cold NVMe reboot, reset loops and a 24-hour soak — have not been passed. Treat it accordingly.

The fallback engine

Virtualization.framework can also run Windows, and it is genuinely worse at it: no TPM device, and Setup is often a black screen until the viogpudo driver binds. It exists as a fallback, not a recommendation.

1vm create win --guest windows --hypervisor apple   # the fallback