Botspot's BVM Puts a Surprisingly Speedy Windows 11 on Your Raspberry Pi

Pseudonymous student and single-board computer fan "Botspot" has released a tool that puts Microsoft's Windows 11 on the Raspberry Pi — as a surprisingly speedy virtual machine running atop of its existing Linux distribution.

"I released a free script for running [Microsoft] Windows 11 on [Raspberry] Pi OS," Botspot explains of the project. "It works on all 4th and 5th generation [Raspberry] Pi models, Compute Modules, and other SBCs [Single-Board Computers], unlike WoR [the Windows on R Project] which only partially worked on [Raspberry] Pi 4 and some 5s, never on Wi-Fi, and now is abandoned."

Microsoft officially supported Windows, in its cut-down Windows 10 IoT Core form, on the Raspberry Pi for a brief period — but despite having launched its own Arm-based Windows portables and partnered with Qualcomm on Snapdragon-powered Windows 11 Copilot+ machines the company's support quickly faded. Rather than working to get a Windows on Arm build working on the Raspberry Pi as a bare-metal operating system, then, Botspot has opted to virtualize it — running it as a guest on top of Raspberry Pi OS or another Linux operating system.

"You may assume it must be slow, but due to Windows being able to directly use ARM64 CPU instructions, it's actually quite usable. It does not feel emulated because it is virtualized on a native hardware architecture," Botspot claims. "Of particular note is audio, internet, and USB pass-through, which gives Windows direct access to specific physical hardware of your choosing."

The virtual machine has full access to the Raspberry Pi's Wi-Fi and Ethernet network ports as standard, Botspot says, and audio playback works out of the box. It has access to files stored in a shared network folder, and it uses Microsoft's Prism translation layer to run traditional x86 software — without it needing to be recompiled for Arm. Add in USB pass-through, and it's possible to use Windows-only hardware on the Raspberry Pi. The only real lack: there's no hardware acceleration for graphics, making gaming a no-go.

More information is available in Botspot's Raspberry Pi forum post, while the project's main repository on GitHub has full instructions on getting started.