Is anyone running any type of hypervisor on the uConsole? Specifically a Windows VM.
I’m thinking that might fill my very occasional Windows need. I have Parrot Security running right now, and I think it might have KVM included, need to do some research and see if this is possible.
Thoughts?
you can’t run real windows on a pi, even virtualized.
Why not? there is an arm windows: Running Windows 11 on Raspberry Pi: A Step-by-Step Guide for Installat
It “may” be possible with enough work arounds. Keep in mind that KVM requires virtualization capabilites from the CPU. You can run some VM’s without it, its just more resource intensive. With the pi, i wouldn’t expect great performance if you do get it running. I would run any other alternative you have to meet your goal before this.
Here, a just release video for your enjoyment.
I stand corrected, that works much better then I anticipated. A lot probably has to do with it running on the pi5 / CM5, but still, nice!
I saw a post for that video coming up this morning and posted a comment that this might solve one of my problems. The ability to look at an NDI video stream would have saved me a lot of walking back and forth between buildings this morning.
I’ll watch that video when I get home from work and hope that it might be good enough on a cm4, if not then buying a cm5/16gb might be in my very near future!
I know, I should stop trying to do real work with these enthusiast devices, but it really is almost the perfect physical layout, unfortunately I need some Windows tools as they aren’t really available for Linux (even under Wine). And since these tools are pretty niche to the work I do, not going to be popular enough for the developers to provide them for these ARM powered devices.
Don’t let anyone tell you what you shouldn’t do! be brave! struggle!
Watching Jeff Geerling install this on level 2 Jeff, it’s WoR which may not be what I want, but going to try it anyway. Looks like I need half a day for a slow process with WoR.
Think I’m going to build a fresh install.
ehh, forgot about that. Was lack of application support I was thinking about. My bad.
BVM is going, but VERY slow on an SD card. After an hour and fifteen minutes, I’m downloading virtio drivers with a few steps left to go.
[edit] just failed… Need a larger card! Do not try this unless you have larger than 64GB, it tries to make a 40GB space for Windows, and uses a pile getting things ready. My 64GB is not big enough.
I’ll have to put my 256 card back in and see if it will go, but getting late and not sure how much more time I can give it tonight.
i just finished installing windows on my 8gb CM4 using BVM. It took over 4 hours and windows runs slowly, but it works.
Are you running it direct or headless and RDP to get in?
I think I have another 2 hours to go.
Headless and RDP. I don’t really have a need for Windows and I mostly tried this just for fun.
With CM4, you can emulate a 486/50 which is able to run Windows 95 in 86Box. If you’re interested in running DirectX/OpenGL games, you can do a 486/90 in the same configuration. Running games in MSDOS/FreeDOS, You can emulate around a Pentium 70.
I haven’t done as much testing with a CM5, but it can emulate a Pentium 133 in 86Box. And depending on what you want to do in the emulator, maybe a little more. That’s more than enough beans to run Windows 98.
Note I am talking about 86Box, not Box86. 86Box is a pure software x86 emulator. Box86 is a translation layer.
Everything I need is 64bit and some of it will not run older than windows 10.
Windows updates are brutal! Those cumulative updates take hours, I’m going to need to defeat the updates.
Wow, thanks for posting that link! I installed bvm earlier today on my Devterm (CM4, 8GB), and it’s surprisingly functional. It’s slow, but I expected it to be a lot slower. Though it was a different device, I played around with WoR on the Pi400 a year or two ago, and I don’t remember it being as fast as this thing is. I don’t have a CM5 to try or compare, but I’m guessing it might be close to full speed on one of those. I have a ridiculous 400GB card in my Devterm, so space wasn’t an issue, and I was thinking I might start over from scratch anyway since I’ve got one of your first Bookworm OS builds running on it. I could probably just update, but I’ve done plenty of weird things with it kind of figuring I’d install something more stable later on.
Anyhow, bvm is kind of magical. Probably more of a tech demo for CM4.
Also, @Greg_E, I think you had mentioned you were looking to view video streams. When I was reading up on bvm before installing it, they mentioned there was no accelerated video. So I’m guessing watching a video stream would be even more painful.
When I was playing with this, I wasn’t directly using the Devterm. I VNC’d into it. So my display updates were probably taking a bit of a hit from that, but it still seemed fast enough to use with some patience. I didn’t try to install anything serious on it though.Definitely wouldn’t want to play games on it on the CM4, and probably not on a CM5 either. Still, kinda cool, and maybe useful for certain applications that don’t require fast updates or interactions, and don’t run via Wine of Box86, etc.
Hardware support would be tricky too. While I didn’t try it with anything, it looked like it could support USB passthrough for devices. But I don’t think bluetooth or (direct) wifi is an option. It has internet access through the virtual ethernet stuff it sets up, but I don’t think there’s a way to see other machines on the host machine’s LAN, etc. Direct IP access would work though.
Mine is broken, the update process never really finished. It’s trying to undo the changes now, which is probably another 2 hours left.
I’m going to try running the ChrisTitus powershell tool to slim this down a bit more, and might block all updates.
My initial attempt was just on a fast 64gb card, the 256gb card is a v30 and significantly faster. I may try to find a v60 a2 card for the long term.
As far as the video streams, yes, it is probably going to be a bad experience. But I’m going to try anyway. My back up plan will have to be running the tools on another computer and rdp/vnc into that computer to check how things are working. Not as ideal, but probably a more workable method.