Windows support? about m1n1

[marcan]

Windows will never run on bare metal Apple Silicon machines without Microsoft's cooperation, as porting it requires making changes to the core Windows kernel, like it did for Linux.

It would in principle be possible to run it in a thin VM that emulates an ARM SystemReady-compliant system that can boot vanilla ARM Windows, but that's out of scope for this project; however, I heard the pongoOS guys may be interested in working on that.

Either way, actually getting a usable Windows booting on Apple Silicon with the thin hypervisor approach would still require developing drivers for all the hardware, which is a massive undertaking that is outside of the scope of Asahi Linux; however, the drivers we write for Linux will be licensed under permissive licenses, so others are free to use them as a base to port them to Windows.

Of course, Windows will happily run in full-fat VM hypervisors on macOS and on Linux, so that approach is no issue; KVM already works on our Linux kernel and the patches are being reviewed right now. Obviously this won't perform as well as the thin HV approach, but it doesn't require writing any Windows drivers, as all the hardware would be virtualized.