[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Yet another nugget of information 😃

Client versios of Windows don’t support nested VM’s, so that means that a VM can’t create another VM.

An upshot of that that surprised me is that a VM can’t run WSL2 either, because it requires creating the WSL2 light weight virtual machine.

If you want to do that kind of thing then you will need a server version of Windows, I suppose Microsoft has to earn mony some how 😁

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Another nugget of information.

It appears that WSL2 on Windows 11 DOES have GPU acceleration enabled by default.

I installed the x11 package on Windows 10 but it was unable to open a display device for xcalc, works just fine on Windows 11 though.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

As yet there are no details on what will be done for domestic customers who don’t want or need broadband over their land line.

Many peoples phone socket is not near a power socket so installing a router would require additional wiring.

It is possible to supply power over copper (they did it for the isdn terminal adapters) so they could supply a socket sized, line powerd, ADSL modem with enough logic to plug in a standard phone, and maybe an ethernet socket so you could plug in a router if you change your mind later.

But, as I said, no details yet.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Another thing that may not be obvious, with the Hypervisor running, nothing gets to run on a real CPU.

The Hypervisor creates Virtual Processors on request from a VM manager. A VP is a data structure that represents CPU state and an associated thread which actually gets scheduled to run.

The host/root OS always gets the same number of VP’s as there are logical cores, and they have a higher priority than any other VP, but you can give your VM’s as many as you like.

How the VP’s are scheduled depends on your version of Windows (by default), client versions get the root scheduler where the root OS gets to choose, server versions get the core scheduler where the Hypervisor chooses ( you get to setup VP priorities).

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

You will be asking me about SR-IOV next 😁

The answer about DDA is yes it works, but probably not for you.

Making DDA work requires a Single Route capable graphics driver (you may well have one, it was one of the things that only Pro cards had but I think its general release now) and a Server version of Windows 🙄

As far as I knew, VBS was a requirement for Windows 11, you can switch it on or off with Windows 10 but they have removed the setting from the security page on Windows 11.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I meant secure user mode also runs in VTL1, obviously 😄

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Just read your link, so this is what I THINK it means.

Windows 11 uses the hypervisor to set up two virtual trust levels, VTL0 and VTL1. The new secure kernel runs in VTL1 and CPU ring O.

There is also the new secure user mode which also runs at VTL0 but in CPU ring 3,

Microsoft calls apps that run in secure user mode “trustlets” and they gain access to the secure kernel and, through that, the hypervisor API

 

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

By the way, I had previously looked all over the place for information about Windows virtualisation based security and found almost nothing, then I finally got Windows Internals part 2 7th edition and there it all was 😃

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Well I was wondering how the Windows 11 upgrade would deal with a system that already had a hypervisor but I have now read up on VMware Workstation so now I know it only has a type 2 hypervisor, so its basically just an app.

On the Windows 11 side, you will have the hypervisor, which loads before anything else, running in the CPU’s root mode (people call it ring -1, but neither Intel or AMD do)  and all of the virtualisation stack, which runs as part of the root OS (always Windows at the moment)

The ONLY part of Hyper-V you won’t have running is the virtual machine manager, you only get that if you have Windows Pro or above and enable it.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

that’s meant to be 2 dashes, not one long one.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

If you feel like having a go with WSL yourself then the good news is that you now have Windows 11 and it already has all the virtualization stuff loaded, so all you have to do is open an admin command prompt and type

wsl –install

That should be it, not like it were in my day with an insider build of Windows 10 !

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Well I got that far so I couldn’t help myself, a quick sudo apt-get install wbritish and we get…

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Just grabbed it via github on Windows and pasted it into home/graham-dearsley. So now I just have a directory with no words in it !

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I would love to give it a go, but I haven’t got github on wsl and I haven’t got a clue how to do it. It’s just Ubuntu though, so if you want to give me the idiots guide I will give it a go.

In the mean time, here is a picture of xcalc, running on wsl, running on Windows 11 🙂

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Could you do me a favour Ed ?

I would be interested to know what version of schedular you get if you are running 3rd party virtualisation software on Windows 11 so any chance you could launch Event Viewer and run a filter on “system” like in the shot below ?

My system is running type 4 which is the ROOT schedular (the root/host OS gets to choose)  which is the default for non-server versions of Windows.

 

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I noticed you mentioned your virtual machines Ed.

Did you know that your entire Windows 11 installation is actually running as a VM on top of the Hyper-V Hypervisor ?

I only read up about the full  implications of virtualization based security last week and only then did I realise what a proper type 1 hypervisor did.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I couldn’t find a better group to wish everyone a happy new year so, HAPPY NEW YEAR !

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

A very merry christmas to all, I haven’t started thinking about it yet but I may forget later 😁

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Has it always been possible to put the Windows 11 start button back where it belongs, on the left ?

I only just noticed the option in task bar preferences, so thats what I did.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Amazing.

Even more amazing is that you get to play with Unreal engine for free as part of Visual Studio.

I had a quick look, but I really couldn’t do anything useful with it at the moment.

[Author]

Posts