UTM can boot Windows 10

[bill-p]

I'll let you guys know if this goes all the way.

Performance is pretty... urg, by the way. It's not horrible, but I'd say it feels slower than running Windows 10 via Parallels on Intel Mac.

As an aside, Linux works. I tried Linux Mint Live CD and that booted just fine.

 

[bill-p]

And a picture speaks a thousand words...

This is Linux Mint x86-64, by the way. It's not ARM Linux.

 

[Gnattu]

UTM is not "virtualizing" but "simulating" a cpu, in this case a x86 one.
This is why you will have a huge performance hit.

 

[kjd2234]

And a picture speaks a thousand words...

This is Linux Mint x86-64, by the way. It's not ARM Linux.

Thanks for your efforts! Is this in QEMU? How is performance?

 

[bill-p]

Yeah, it's in qemu. UTM is basically just a front-end.

Performance is... not great to be honest, but is still far better than iPad. And this is somewhat on par with VirtualBox running on Intel Mac IMHO. That's actually saying it runs far better than anyone would expect!

Only 1 pair of CPU cores (efficiency and performance) is utilized, so I'm guessing if we can get 2 pairs of cores working, it may run a bit better. I'm still stuck on setting up Windows 10, but once it's done, I'll try Linux Mint MATE and let you know how that works. Cinnamon has always been a bit more eye candy, but also more resource-intensive for me.

 

[bill-p]

And... there we go.

That installation process took quite a long while...

The short of it is: it works, albeit very very slowly. If it's anything like the iPhone and iPad Pro, Windows 7 is by far the better candidate for this. I'll see if I can find my old Windows 7 product key...

There are also a few recommended tweaks like... installing SPICE guest tools. I'll try to do that and see if it improves performance or not.

This is purely for... academic and maybe tinkering reasons. There is no way anyone would want to use this for productivity.

 

[etjazz]

Are you running this on the UTM release from yesterday?

Releases · utmapp/UTM

Virtual machines for iOS and macOS. Contribute to utmapp/UTM development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[bill-p]

Yeah, that's it. It has a number of bugs right now and even when it works, performance is pretty bad.

 

[anonymous888]

Upload a short video. I want to see how slow it is.

 

[bill-p]

Basically just like this:

Maybe slightly faster, but not fast enough.

 

[tdar]

I was trying hard last night to do this (couldn’t get utm to make a hd) but after seeing this I’m not interested anymore. 4:45 to just boot windows 10. Fun exercise but not useful. Thanks @bill-p . You did it do that we don’t have to!!?

 

[bill-p]

You need to run the qemu-img command manually to create a disk image, and then import it into UTM. The UI has some major bugs on MacOS.

I can go in and fix some of the bugs myself, but the performance level is not really worth it, to be honest. Maybe if you really really want to run Linux with a GUI (Ubuntu and Mint are pretty usable).