Surface 7 Laptop - windows 10 iso virtualisation NOT working

Question

Surface 7 Laptop - windows 10 iso virtualisation NOT working

I purchased latest: Surface laptop 7th edition Model 2037, Snapdragon (R) X12-core processor (ARM)

According to the following link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-supported-operating-systems - this PC doesn't support windows 10 operation software. I have been told by Microsoft support (get help application team) since this PC does not support windows 10 it will not work under the Hyper-V virtualisation as well, can you please confirm this?

Note: I had already tried to run the windows 10 iso under the Hyper-V and It did NOT WORK for me. If the above is true and the Hyper-V can be used only to run Windows 11 within Hyper-V as a part of windows 11, I think this defeats the point of virtualisation which allowed me always in the past on different laptops (lenovo, asus, siemens, HP, dell, etc) to run different versions of windows operation software on one PC which is required for my work. Please advise.

Answer 1

Hello,

Thank you for posting in Q&A forum.

I suggest you open cmd and run the following command. You can see the hyper-v requirement at the bottom to check whether your current device supports hyper-v.

systeminfo

I hope the information above is helpful.

Best regards

Zunhui

============================================

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Answer 2

PH Running systeminfo command in the command prompt comes with the following answer: Hyper-V requirements: Hypervisor has been detected. Features required for hyper-v will not be displayed. This does not answer my question. Even if I know Hyper-V requirements are met, it doesn't explain what type of windows can be run on the Hyper-V application.

Please note my original question!

I have been told by Microsoft support (get help application team) since this PC (Surface laptop 7th edition Model 2037, Snapdragon (R) X12-core processor (ARM)) does not support windows 10 it will not work under the Hyper-V virtualisation as well, can you please confirm this?

Note: I had already tried to run the windows 10 iso under the Hyper-V and It did NOT WORK for me. If the above is true and the Hyper-V can be used only to run Windows 11 within Hyper-V as a part of windows 11, I think this defeats the point of virtualisation which allowed me always in the past on different laptops (lenovo, asus, siemens, HP, dell, etc) to run different versions of windows operation software on one PC which is required for my work.

Please advise.

Answer 3

PH Are you still planning to respond here, to this question? The only answer provided is not relevant and doesn't address the original question. Please advise.

Answer 4

This is the misunderstanding: "I think this defeats the point of virtualisation which allowed me always in the past... to run different versions of windows operation software on one PC".

Your problem is not about versions. The hardware and hypervisor that you have will run all sorts of different versions of operating systems as long as they were built for ARM. There has never been a public release of Windows 10 built for ARM, therefore you cannot run Windows 10 on an ARM system, virtualized or not. If Microsoft reversed course and released Windows 10 for ARM, then you could still only run Windows 10 for ARM on this system. Again, it is not about versions.

Because you brought it up, the point of virtualization is to provide environmental separation. A hypervisor uses virtualization to allow multiple operating systems to co-exist on the same hardware. Part of the way it does that involves virtual hardware. Virtual hardware has the same characteristics of the underlying physical hardware. Sometimes, we can "get away" with virtual hardware that looks different than physical hardware because the virtual and physical hardware use the same interfaces, or we can build trivial drivers to handle the translation. However, the ARM instruction set is too different from the x86 and AMD64 instruction sets to use them interchangeably. Open up the CPU properties of the guest operating system on any virtual machine on any hypervisor, and you see something that looks nearly identical to what the host operating system reports for CPUs.

What you're looking for is emulation. Emulation involves a software construct that has all the interfaces and features of a piece of hardware. It works by intercepting software requests intended for the target hardware, converting them to requests that the real hardware can understand, and then performing reverse translation on the response. To run software built for x86 or AMD64 architecture on an ARM processor, you need an x86/AMD64 emulator that runs on ARM hardware.

No hypervisor emulates x86/AMD64 on ARM. That is not the purpose of a hypervisor. Hypervisors only perform emulation for relatively trivial hardware, like drive controllers and basic network adapters. CPU emulation is not trivial. What you're encountering is also not particular to Windows 10. Hyper-V on a Windows 11 ARM installation also will not run x86/AMD64 Linux, IBM i, VMS, Super Nintendo ROMs, or any other operating system, environment, or software that was not specifically built to run on ARM. Replace "Hyper-V on a Windows 11" with any other hypervisor and you get the same outcome.

qemu might perform this emulation for you. I have not looked. If it does, expect it to be slow at best. It will probably be buggy and crash a lot.