I came across this on twitter, by the looks of it, it may not be too long before we can run productivity type apps (like Outlook 365) also on the new apple silicon
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Windows running on M1 with QEMU x86 emulation
- Thread starter etjazz
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
He’s got windows 10 running there. But he admits performance is terrible.
Yeah I’m not expecting gaming performance. That ship has sailed. But give me enough seed to run the office apps and a few other random utilities I’d need to run under Windows and I’ll be happy.
I have it running. Well crawling slowly is more like it. I put a kvm/qemu VM I have for some old VS2010 build system on. I didn't go out of my way to optimize GFX or CPU selection within x86_64. I set 2 core and 4GB of RAM. It took probably 6-8 min to get to desktop. My 2 cents is if you need Windows x86/x86-64 probably will want another solution. Crossover office might work for now for some applications. Full Windows is not likely practical. Granted this is running on Rosetta copy of qemu. Maybe a native ARM qemu will be more usable I doubt by much. RDP to another box might be best. YMMV.
Attachments
Thanks for sharing your experience! I am wondering, have you experimented with other virtualization, such as Linux?
I will be testing that after bit. I have an older Ubuntu img file on the archive store. I had a prefabbed VM for qemu easily accessible of Win7. If the patches for native apple silicon QEMU or someone links to binary of it. I'd be happy to test again.
that is slower than utmapp on an iPad Pro, so definitely some room for improvement!
Many thanks for your testing, I’m still waiting for my M1 air to arrive
I believe utmapp can now run on macOS (saw something in their discord about a build). I don't have a apple silicon machine to try yet...
The emulator is not sending the windowing/screen to the GPU so it has to do all the work of drawing,bitblit,moving megabits of screen around 60 times a second.
once they come out with an emulator that uses metal you will see a huge difference in performance.
Has anyone tried the ARM version of Windows 10? People do it on Raspberry Pi’s
www.worproject.ml
Downloads | Windows on Raspberry
Get the full desktop experience of Windows on your Raspberry Pi
So to put these scores in context, even on a unoptimized VM, we are seeing single core spreads that are faster than any other Mac that doesn’t have M1.
And multi core that when optimized will be within shouting distance from a 12 core Mac Pro. If it doesn’t beat it.
That’s not bad.
Hard to believe but that is probably the fastest windows for arm system in the world- at least in the hands of customers.
This is all extremely promising, considering there’s been no official word from Microsoft directly about any of this. If some folks can manage to get Windows working, albeit not ideal performance wise, just imagine what Microsoft will do. I mean, they make a lot of money off of licensing! They’re not going to want to give that up. And I’m sure they’ve only just begun testing. The future is bright.
That's not very encouraging. Any thoughts as to whether this is Windows 10-specific, i.e. will performance for Windows 7 or MacOS X 10.6 be more usable? I have a bunch of VMs used for compatibility with older software (PowerPC Mac and early Windows items) and it would be a bitter pill to lose all of that.
There is already an extensive thread regarding windows on M1:
forums.macrumors.com
EDIT: ah, ok it’s about Windows on Arm in the mentioned thread. Sorry.
[SUCCESS] Virtualize Windows 10 for ARM on M1 with Alexander Graf's qemu hypervisor patch
I was able to successfully virtualize Windows 10 for ARM on M1 with Alexander Graf's QEMU hypervisor patch. Screenshot: How to virtualize Windows 10 on M1: 1.
Download qemu-m1.zip from https://mega.nz/file/QYB0QTrC#p6IMBJlFqqNKuGonwrDkPOVKQj8yHCVgiLOYVaGvs4M or this forum attachment. It...
forums.macrumors.com
EDIT: ah, ok it’s about Windows on Arm in the mentioned thread. Sorry.
Running the insider's version of ARM Windows 10 seems to do much better. It runs win32 an win64 pretty well like a Rosetta. That seems to be the way. Hopefully, MS will allow retail sale or partnered w/ Parallels or the like. Full system emulation just isn't practical.
Yeah, it's a solution for some Windows applications, but from what I can see, Windows XP Mode cannot be added to Windows on ARM (makes sense - it's an x86 virtual machine that runs inside Windows 7 although a few people seem to have gotten it to work on Windows 10 x64 too).There is already an extensive thread regarding windows on M1:
[SUCCESS] Virtualize Windows 10 for ARM on M1 with Alexander Graf's qemu hypervisor patch
I was able to successfully virtualize Windows 10 for ARM on M1 with Alexander Graf's QEMU hypervisor patch. Screenshot: How to virtualize Windows 10 on M1: 1. Download qemu-m1.zip from https://mega.nz/file/QYB0QTrC#p6IMBJlFqqNKuGonwrDkPOVKQj8yHCVgiLOYVaGvs4M or this forum attachment. It...
EDIT: ah, ok it’s about Windows on Arm in the mentioned thread. Sorry.