I have to admit that I'm puzzled why people are loosing their shit when an operating system that is built to run on an ARM device turns out to run on one of the most popular ARM devices in existence. Why?

There is no retail version of Windows for ARM. It only comes pre-installed on ARM devices, or through some partner channel when you form a business deal to sell ARM devices. Last I saw the current way to get Windows on ARM was by extracting it from an old Windows IoT project build. So it's novel and interesting when someone figures out how to work around all these roadblocks to get Windows working on a consumer ARM SBC.

Maybe that was true previously but these days you can just download a disk image for Windows ARM ready-to-go from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsins...

Especially given Windows NT, back when it was called that, was portable, and supported various RISC processors.

When working on Win2k it started off still trying to support MIPS and PPC but then shipped only x86 and Alpha

I thought Win2k on the Alpha was cancelled, too, although they made a Beta. There was an article posted here on HN recently from 1999 about Microsoft cancelling Win2k on Alpha.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27603531

(Sorry for being a smartass about it.)

I remember shipping SP6 and 6a still supporting 4 arch. And we were still testing 2k on x86 and Alpha in my group (NLB). Ages ago, can't hardly remember.

And this is what I hope ReactOS will become one day, in spite of Microsoft's FUD campaigns.

The fact that it runs without hacks or fiddling with drivers?

Raspberry Pi 4 supports UEFI, and Windows 10 already worked on it. So, not too surprising.

You can download ARM builds with the click of a button if you have an MSDN subscription. If you don't have one (I don't), there is a great website to download Windows update images directly from Microsoft (and turn them into ISOs):

https://uupdump.net

I downloaded a Windows 10 ARM64 ISO, loaded it into Parallels on my M1 MacBook Air, put in my product key, and it works great!

(now, if only Visual Studio could be compiled for ARM64...)

AFAIK windows 10 already had official raspberry pi builds, so it's not too surprising.

They seem to be forever trailing far behind Microsoft's system, though. What version are they targetting now, 2003R2? Windows 7?

It would be very interesting to see what happened, though, if a bunch of companies / government organizations would pool their resources to fund ReactOS development, if only to put the screws on Microsoft when negotiating new licenses. Like IBM mainframe customers putting Amdahl swag on their desks when negotiating with IBM salespeople to get a discount.

If they achieve 100% compatibility, there could also be a significant market for a Windows-compatible system that will support device drivers and software written for old versions of Windows. In my last job, we had a number of customers still running Windows XP on SCADA boxes, because they needed to support some piece of hardware whose vendor had either gone out of business or stopped supporting that hardware, so XP was the last version of Windows with drivers available to support that hardware.

One customer in particular still ran MS-DOS on a few machines for similar reasons - the vendor of their SCADA system had gone out of business ... a long time ago, it seems, and they were very reluctant to migrate to something more recent. It was really weird, because as I remember, some of these machines did not run DOS, but some ancient version of QNX running several virtual DOS machines for visualization stuff.

(Okay, I'm rambling. I should lay off the coffee.)

Official Windows for RPi is Windows 10 IoT Core, not Windows 10. ARM Windows 10 license isn't sold separately but bundled to certificated device (like Surface X), but some hackers installs ARM Windows 10 image (that's for certified devices) to RPi without license.

yes arm64, the twitter thread also said they didn't have to do any TPM tricks, it just worked. i read somewhere else only the installer now requires TPM, the OS boot does not, but that will change when it goes gold

I wouldn't be surprised if the ARM builds don't require a TPM, and they kick the can down the road WRT requiring equivalent functionality on ARM. TPMs are very, very x86. For instance that LPC bus they sit on is almost electrically the 8086 front side bus, just with a tiny state machine in front to serialize it (hence LPC: Low Pin Count 8086 Bus).

There's of course equivalent security processors and domains on pretty much every ARM application soc, but the exact semantics of them (like pretty much everything in the ARM space that's outside of the actual CPU core complexes) is extremely heterogeneous. They might even be running in EL3 on the application cores themselves. Wrangling all of that is probably out of scope for W11 RTM.

The preview builds of Windows 11 don't enforce the TPM requirement.

Sure, I'm talking about even the RTM build for ARM which is the first non preview ARM build. They've said that final builds will require TPMs, but I'm making the argument that there's a good chance this will only apply to x86 and won't apply to ARM builds.

That's pretty interesting.

Going off on a tangent here, but thinking of how most of the world ran Windows XP/Windows 7 on cracked versions, would it be possible that following the TPM requirement, someone would write a TPM emulator (or maybe some more clever hack) so that Windows 11 doesn't complain about those stuffs and just install/boot? (disclaimer: I have no idea how TPM works and have never had to use it...)

It's probably easier and more likely that software crackers will patch out the TPM requirement and make pirate versions of Windows 11 that install without it.

Emulating a TPM at the hardware level is possible but too much work when you can just buy the chips themselves--they aren't some magic unobtanium locked down thing, for example: https://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/trusted-platfor...

The problem is to get an old system to use it you'd have to also modify its bios to make it aware of the TPM (and figure out how to get access to the phsyical bus the TPM needs to interface with the motherboard). There is a lot of reverse engineering and work to do that sort of thing.

> Emulating a TPM at the hardware level is possible but too much work

good for us that amd does it for free, huh? https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/pro-security (fTPM)

Where do the keys get strored? Flash in the CPU? UEFI variables? A second flash chip on the motherboard?

it depends amd mostly uses its psp (platform security processor) of course security depends on amd's enclave. it basically uses ARM TrustZone, microsoft explained it in a paper: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... so the internal storage is eMMC with RPMB and a hardware fuse

As long as it's not validated via the unique manufacturers key in the TPM it's possible. Any other software/website will assume you have a working TPM if you are running Win11 and will likely break however so the experience will be somewhat unusable.

Outside of the native OS modules using it for security (e.g. Windows Hello) I can't see many apps having a use for TPM let alone breaking. Perhaps DRM content will move towards using it at some point but it's always been a circus to get high tier DRM solutions to validate on Windows anyways, most just fallback to low validation with lower quality streams as is.

If you don't think 'rightsholders' will jump on this like a fly on dung then you're naive. Everyone from Netflix to Getty Images to Adobe has been waiting for this.

As I said, "Perhaps DRM content will move towards using it at some point but it's always been a circus to get high tier DRM solutions to validate on Windows anyways". They may flock to it but just like SGX + HDCP 2.2 + IME is needed for Netflix to ship 4k to your PC it just means they still won't ship 4k to your PC unless you have a ridiculous set of requirements.

As far as "getty images" websites don't have access to TPM and the DRM available for video (e.g. Widevine) is both more limited than the native stack (i.e. already can't be used for tier 1/2 DRM content) and for video only. Could the entire browser landscape change in the next few years to enable that? Sure, but it has nothing to do with TPM on Windows.

I'd say we're already seeing things go in that direction.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Plugins/Flash_to_HT...

From what I've heard W11 in a VM won't require a TPM to install. So worst case install it to your HDD from VirtualBox and see what happens booting on bare metal?

I installed the preview the other day and yes it works just fine under VirtualBox

I got Windows 11 via Windows Update for my Surface Pro 3. I'm pretty sure it only has TPM and not TPM 2.0.

There was a post yesterday about someone installing it on a recent machine and then swapped the drive to an older allegedly "unsupported" old machine and it worked just fine. YMMV.