Windows 11 may soon natively run on Apple M1 and more thanks to this new project

If you wanted to run Windows 11 on Apple hardware, there are mainly two ways do so, either running it via Parallels, or using a Windows 10 hack method to run it natively. If you are aware of other ways to do it, let us know in the comments. Last year, Microsoft had clarified that it was unlikely to ever support Windows 11 on Mac or M1 which means unofficial support is what enthusiasts are looking forward to.

And in light of that, it may soon be possible to run Microsoft's Windows 11 natively on Apple M1 and other Apple Silicon hardware according to a developer Arminder Singh, who is working on a project to make that possible. But these are very early days, and Singh has thrown caution to the wind stating that there are several challenges one must overcome. In his blog post he says:

Contrary to how it may appear on the surface, Apple’s chips are architecturally very different from standard ARM64 chips from companies like Qualcomm or MediaTek and a lot of hardware enablement needs to be done as a result. Thankfully a lot of work has already been done in this area for Linux through the Asahi Linux project

This is not going to be a trivial project to finish, there’s a lot of Apple specific oddities I must account for and things I need to do to ensure the M1 is able to boot Windows in a stable way.

For those wondering what the Asahi Linux project is, it's a similar project which aims to run Linux on Apple Silicon.

However, as mentioned above, there are specific challenges Apple hardware presents. Singh has explained that the major issue is related to Apple's proprietary interrupt controller dubbed Apple Interrupt Controller (AIC). The second problem is related to M1's Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) which only supports 16K pages and not 8K.

With such roadblocks, Singh has reiterated that the project may not succeed though he is working actively to bypass these obstacles. Hence, there is no ETA at the moment.

This project is not guaranteed to be successful. I’ll do my best to ensure it goes to completion but ultimately, there is zero guarantee that I will be able to get Windows working in a great way by the end of it all. But I’m going to try my absolute hardest.

I’ll need time to make sure everything works properly so there’s no ETA on anything thus far.

You can find more details on Arminder Singh's blog post here.

Via: Deskmodder

Windows 11 may soon natively run on Apple M1 and more thanks to this new project