Category: Windows

running windows 11 as a vm under unbuntu on an rpi 5

whbeebe

Executive Summary

I came across a post on Jeff Geerling’s blog about how to install Windows 11 as a VM on a Raspberry Pi. Being retired and with plenty of “leisure” time on my hands, I decided to follow along and see what it was like, so I set out to install the same tools using the same essential process he did. I got it to work (barely), but I wasn’t impressed with the results. It took me an entire day to get it all installed and running, only to eventually fail. In the end I deleted everything.

Installation and Setup

Before I get started, let me document my Raspberry Pi 5 setup, because it’s a little different than stock.

  • Raspberry Pi 5 Model B Rev 1.0 with up-to-date firmware
  • 8 GiB memory
  • Raspberry Pi official active cooling fan
  • Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+
  • Timetec 512GB M.2 2242 NVMe PCIe Gen3x4 SSD
  • Ubuntu 24.04.2 for Raspberry Pi booting off the SSD

The Geerling post links to the creator and developer of the system for installing the ARM version of Windows 11, Botspot Virtual Machine, or BVM, on GitHub. While the directions for installing this is on GitHub, Geerling’s post links to a YouTube video he produced of him installing the software and getting Windows 11 running. I think that video is a bit deceptive concerning how much time it takes to get everything installed. In my case, just getting the ISO downloaded took over seven hours. Here’s a screenshot showing my desktop with System Monitor and a terminal with BVM doing its thing.

The amount of time to download Windows 11 ARM64 can be seen in the middle of the terminal, in the text section beneath “Downloading Windows 11…” There are four consecutive lines of text, with the time it took each operation timed on the far right. Totaled up, it took over seven hours to download the ISO. The download speeds are in the low hundreds of kilobytes. I’ve never seen anything that slow before, even on an old Raspberry Pi 2 or 3. Downloading the virtio drivers took another two hours. And then there was the step installing Windows 11 itself.

Even BVM warned “This will take several hours,” and it wasn’t wrong. It took several hours.

Operation

After a period of nearly 12 hours, from early in the morning until late in the evening, I managed to bring up a small Windows 11 640 x 480 window on the desktop.

I briefly tried to expand that resolution to something more useful, but this version of Windows wouldn’t allow me to change the screen resolution. You’ll note from System Monitor that I nearly exhausted swap. I closed the Windows VM at this point and increased local swap from 1 GiB to 4 GiB. One other notable difference, on Ubuntu at least you need to run bvm boot-gtk instead of bvm boot.

I did follow the BVM README and restarted the Windows 11 VM as headless in one terminal, then ran bvm connect in a second terminal. This produced the screen you see above. Desktop performance was greatly improved and the screen is a little bigger, but I don’t know what the resolution is. Unfortunately I can neither resize nor move it. That window is right smack in the middle of the desktop. I should note once again on System Monitor that swap usage is now at 1.4 GiB. It might be best to run this on a Raspberry Pi with 16 GB. I should also note that even with active cooling running (and the fan did kick in) the CPU temperatures hovered between 60° and 65° C.

Summary

I’m glad I gave this a try. But after these experiences I’m not so certain I’ll keep it on my Raspberry Pi.

Update

I let Windows 11 finish downloading its updates (see the last screenshot above), then I rebooted the Windows 11 VM. After that, headless operation no longer worked. Even bvm boot-gtk no longer worked. So the whole conglomeration was deleted from my Raspberry Pi and all used disk space (in the tens of gigabytes) was recovered. My advice: If you need to get Real Work done, instead of just “bragging rights,” then go shopping on Amazon and pick up one of the current micro PCs with Windows 11 Pro installed for around $300 and use that for your Windows 11 needs.

Links

Windows 11 Arm VMs on a Raspberry Pi, with BVM — https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/windows-11-arm-vms-on-raspberry-pi-bvm

Botspot Virtual Machine – Windows 11 QEMU KVM on ARM Linux — https://github.com/Botspot/bvm

migrating to an nvme drive on a raspberry pi 5 — part 2

one reason i stay away from windows

whbeebe

I have a license to run Parallels Desktop. I started using the application three years ago because I needed to have instances of several Linux distributions conveniently available while I was working on my 2019 MBP. Later I installed an instance of Windows 10 as a virtual machine in order to support C# development within Visual Studio Community. The version of VS available for macOS at that time was a poor cousin to the same versions running on Windows, and to add insult to injury Microsoft wouldn’t provide a community version for macOS. Thus the least expensive route was to pay for a yearly license of Parallels Desktop and install an instance of Windows 10 Pro provided by Parallels.

That worked well until January of 2023 when my last license expired and my local copy of Parallels stopped working. Late last year I finally decided I needed to purchase a new license, so when Black Friday rolled around Parallels had a less-than-half-price sale on a yearly license ($56) and I sprung for it.

When I powered up all my virtual machines to check them out and update them, that included the Windows 10 VM. Except, Parallels automagically updated my Windows 10 installation to Windows 11. Not much of an issue, except when I decided to uninstall Microsoft Edge. So when I went into Settings and then Apps (applications), and went hunting for Microsoft Edge, the dropdown showed only Modify was active, not Uninstall.

There is no reason why I should be blocked from removing Microsoft software, especially the browser. This gives me flashbacks to the late 1990s when Microsoft was being sued for its placement of Internet Explorer among many other monopolistic behaviors. Right now I work entirely within Vivaldi on Windows 11, but it would be nice to get rid of Edge because it’s my VM on my personal computer, and as the saying goes, my computer, my rules.

By the way, on the Windows 10 Pro installation on my other computers (the computers that can’t upgrade to Windows 11), I have removed all Microsoft browsers and installed Vivaldi everywhere. There is no reason to reverse browser removal policy on Windows 11, except that Microsoft is just an absolutely shit company.

Update

This article from The Verge is interesting. Basically, Microsoft has until March to provide the European Economic Area the ability to uninstall Edge and disable Bing search, among other things. If EU Windows users are allowed to do this, then why the hell not US Windows users?

The EU will finally free Windows users from Bing — https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/16/23963579/microsoft-windows-11-eu-digital-markets-act-feature-changes