[kscherer]

Does anyone know the state of Windows on the M1?

Parallels says they are up and running, and all versions of Windows can run on the M1 all the way back to Windows 7. Seems odd to me that they would be emulating X86, though?

I don't understand it all, and hope some of you do. So, here's the question:

Can Parallels run X86 Windows on an M1 Mac? Parallels says yes in some places, but doesn't seem to have any documentation to back it up.

[turtle]

I don't know, but does Parallels have a trial download still? I could install it on Mrs T's MBP and test with a clean install. I'm game....

Edit: of course they do.

[turtle]

Pretty clear here:

[kscherer]

Thanks for that. I think it cleared up the question.

Edit: What version of Windows were you using?

[turtle]

Win10_20H2_English_x64.iso

I have a Win 11 ISO too, but this was easier for me to get from my NAS.

[kscherer]

It's what I suspected. I've been having a discussion with the boss that Windows X86 is not compatible with the M1 Macs, even in virtualization. He says it is, I say it's not, and that in order to be so it would require the VM to emulate an X86 instruction set.

Parallels' website is unclear on what is and is not supported.

[709]

Parallels on M1 only supports ARM versions of Windows, unfortunately.


[edit] From here:

Supported Guest Operating Systems (Mac with Apple M1 chip):

Only ARM versions of operating systems are supported.

•Windows 11 on ARM (recommended)
-Additional information on the M1 experience may be found in this article.
-Windows ARM can run most of the regular Windows x86 applications. You can download the Parallels Desktop trial and install the application of your interest. If it doesn't work, let us know at Parallels Forum.
•Ubuntu Linux 21.10, 21.04, 20.10, 20.04
•Fedora Workstation 35, 34, 33-1.2
•Debian GNU/Linux 11, 10.7
•Kali Linux 2021.3, 2021.2, 2021.1
•macOS Monterey 12 (in-app download)

[turtle]

Hey, they didn't list Raspbian in there! I bet it can run under M1.

[kscherer]

Originally Posted by 709 Parallels on M1 only supports ARM versions of Windows, unfortunately. [edit] From here: Supported Guest Operating Systems (Mac with Apple M1 chip): Only ARM versions of operating systems are supported. •Windows 11 on ARM (recommended) -Additional information on the M1 experience may be found in this article. -Windows ARM can run most of the regular Windows x86 applications. You can download the Parallels Desktop trial and install the application of your interest. If it doesn't work, let us know at Parallels Forum. •Ubuntu Linux 21.10, 21.04, 20.10, 20.04 •Fedora Workstation 35, 34, 33-1.2 •Debian GNU/Linux 11, 10.7 •Kali Linux 2021.3, 2021.2, 2021.1 •macOS Monterey 12 (in-app download)

Thanks much! Those links are exactly what I needed.

[chucker]

Yeah, Parallels does not have any CPU emulation and never did. It runs ARM OSes on ARM and x86 OSes on x86. Same for VMware.

Incidentally, this Monday, I extensively played around with Windows 11 on an M1 MacBook Air. Gotta say, the experience wasn't perfect, but it was much better than I had anticipated. First, though this doesn't matter much for me personally, Parallels really tries to nail that first-run experience — they download Windows for you, run its installer, boot into Windows (at which point they ask you "bee tee dubs, your Parallels isn't licensed"; bit of a dick move there ).

But second, Windows was also quite smooth. The UI was set to 200% in order to match macOS's Retina @2x, and I couldn't spot a lot of places where this was messed up (I did run into one dialog which was almost impossible to read because it was half as tall and wide as it needed to be… ugh). x86 apps seemed to mostly just work™, and they did not feel slow.

The only real issue I ran into wasn't with performance, but rather with apps that presumably had some paths hardcoded: Windows on ARM is this doubly stupid thing where you now have C: \Program Files, C: \Program Files (ARM64) and C: \Program Files (x86) (not sure I got that right, but you get the point), and not everything handles that gracefully. For example, Visual Studio apparently installed the x64 version of the .NET 6 SDK, but tried to run the ARM64 version, and had confusing "path not found" errors as a result.

So, TL;DR: performance on M1 Macs is incredibly (who knew?), but also, you'll run into glitches in Windows where stuff does not just work™, because of this chicken-and-egg thing where almost no app has been tested on ARM Windows, because almost nobody runs ARM Windows.

[kscherer]

Here's another question, then, and maybe you already provided the answer:

Does Windows for ARM run X86 applications?

[chucker]

Indeed it does, mostly seamlessly, both x86 and x64. But there can be glitches where it doesn’t find stuff correctly.

(Note: not drivers! Only apps. If you need a driver for a rare device, things get tricky.)

[kscherer]

Thank you. I will consider my original question answered in full, but will leave the thread open in case other bits come up.

Thanks, guys!

[turtle]

Here is a question you might know chucker, does Windows 11 have OpenVPN support? I could theoretically run my work VM at ARM if it supports OpenVPN connections. I know I can with a native macOS install, but I want to keep work separate from my personal use and not have personal DNS lookups passing through my work DNS servers as one example.

[chucker]

I’ll be able to test this kind of thing when my Mac ships in a few weeks.

[turtle]

Cool. I might try it out before then with Mrs T's MBP... but I might not ether.

[chucker]

(Given that OpenVPN even has a Windows ARM64 download, I suspect the answer is it’ll work fine.)

[turtle]

Oh, that should be fine then. I might just try to build a Win11 ARM VM on Mrs T's MBP just to play then. I have keys laying around thanks to my corp partnership with MS. I have a new project now.

[turtle]

I installed Win11 ARM using Parallels' default install thing. I haven't played with it much, but it does seem to move pretty quickly. I found the ARM install for OpenVPN and will try to install it and play with it later.

I will say the thing I don't like about Parallels' method for Documents is the shared folder with your Mac. I'm sure it is adjustable, but I want work completely separate from my personal use. It is one of the reasons I use a VM for work. For work I put everything in OneDrive and nothing on my Mac. I can grab from my Mac is I need via the web interface of OneDrive.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by turtle I will say the thing I don't like about Parallels' method for Documents is the shared folder with your Mac.

Same, but perhaps for different reasons — I suspect it 1) comes with worse performance and 2) breaks stuff.

(I know for a fact it breaks out app, so when customers ask "can we use this on a Mac? We do have Parallels", I have to point them to Parallels' support article on how to disable this.)

Originally Posted by turtle I'm sure it is adjustable,

It is!

Parallels's defaults are a double-edged sword — on the one hand, it's nice how little you have to configure to get (virtual) Windows booting; OTOH, I disagree with some of their defaults and wish they'd ask about a few of those first.

(Used to be a lot worse. Ca.… 2015 maybe? I played with Parallels, and it did all kinds of mucking with the Windows, installing a theme engine to make it look more like macOS, etc. Without asking. Seems they got enough pushback on that to no longer try.)

[turtle]

Wow. I looked and my last license for Parallels is from v7. They are on v17 now.

I'm been VMware forever it seems. Given I deal with vCenter professionally though it makes sense. I'm not planning to pay for Parallels even if it ends up working like I think it will, I'll wait for VMware to put out a M1 compatible product, assuming they do.

If I ever stop dealing with vCenter I'll be more open to flipping back and forth between the two if needed.

I didn't think about it breaking things because I haven't messed with it for years I assumed it would work. I've only done surface level checks at this point. So nice to know I really need to dig deeper.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by turtle I'm been VMware forever it seems. Given I deal with vCenter professionally though it makes sense.

Yeah, same.

We've mostly gotten rid of ESX by now though so I'm not sure it's worth it any more. But generally, VMware had a bit more of a "solid" feel back in the day.

Originally Posted by turtle I'm not planning to pay for Parallels even if it ends up working like I think it will, I'll wait for VMware to put out a M1 compatible product, assuming they do.

They're working on it! https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/...available.html

I can't comment (yet) on how well that works.

[turtle]

Originally Posted by chucker Yeah, same. We've mostly gotten rid of ESX by now though so I'm not sure it's worth it any more. But generally, VMware had a bit more of a "solid" feel back in the day.

Agreed on the solid feel. For me, I was also burned by Parallels Plesk and just left a bad taste in my mouth for everything Parallels.

We looked at HyperV but the move doesn't make sense for us so we are sticking with vCenter. We are also moving away from private virtualization as a whole and over to Azure for what needs to be virtualized.

They're working on it! https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/...available.html I can't comment (yet) on how well that works.

Thanks for the link! I'm going to install it over the weekend and play with it some too. Who am I kidding, I'm going to do it today while Mrs T isn't using her MBP.

[Brad]

This may be veering a big too far off topic, but has anyone here tried or read recent success stories from other people trying QEMU to fully emulate the x86 ISA for building and booting a Windows VM on these new Apple ARM-like chips?

[chucker]

To what end?

[turtle]

Originally Posted by Brad This may be veering a big too far off topic, but has anyone here tried or read recent success stories from other people trying QEMU to fully emulate the x86 ISA for building and booting a Windows VM on these new Apple ARM-like chips?

I watched a Youtube video of it and wanted cry it was so painful and slow. Like running Win10 on an 8088 I think, with the turbo button of course.

[turtle]

This is more of a pain than I expected. The Insider Preview of ARM Win11 comes in VHDX format. Making it a VMDK is not a simple task without a bunch of other software I'm not running. I'm still digging in to see if I can make it happen but this sucks. I wonder about converting the Parallels image instead of a clean download from MS.....

[chucker]

I’m not sure how Parallels does it (maybe they indeed convert the VHDX on the fly?), but you could try fetching the assets via https://uupdump.net/known.php?q=22000+arm64 and then run this script to turn them into an ISO: https://github.com/uup-dump/converter

[turtle]

Converting the Parallels VM is the fastest way for now. I'm not sure what I'll do with it from here other than some basic use tests for myself, or any of y'all if you ask.

It is running the conversion/import right now. After I get it running later I'll post more. I might go ahead and install the OpenVPN client and set it up like a work VM. Maybe clone it first to save time later though.

[turtle]

Well isn't this interesting:


That is the result of importing the VM from Parallels and attempting to run it. Now I feel like I need to mount the VHDX and VMDK to compare the files inside. At first glance, it certainly makes it seem as though Parallels in emulating.