“We added the ability to install Hyper-V on [Windows 10 on ARM PCs] such as the Surface Pro X running the Enterprise or Pro editions of Windows 10,” a Windows Insider blog post explains. That’s a vague explanation, but it essentially means users need to be running an ARM machine running either the Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 or 8cx processors. Microsoft says there is now a “[Windows 10 on ARM] [virtual hard drive] (VHDX) for Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 19624, so that Insiders can run Windows 10 [on ARM] as a guest OS in Hyper-V.” At the moment, the support remains in preview and packaged in Windows 10 Insider Preview build 19631. In fact, this is the only major feature included in this update. It is worth noting there are a couple of limitations worth pointing out before you can rejoice at being able to run virtual versions of Windows 10 on ARM.
Hyper-V will only run on systems with Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 19559 or above. There’s no support for nested virtualization. Of course, you can’t install the virtualization on an Intel Windows machine.
Upcoming Emulator for 64-Bit Apps
Earlier this week, we reported on Microsoft’s development of an emulator that will run 64-bit apps on Windows 10 on ARM. In a GitHub commit by Kenny Kerr, Principal software engineer on the Windows team, the company is developing 64-bit app emulation in its unique ARM-based Windows 10 platform. Specifically, the company is working on “AMR64EC”, which is reportedly the architecture for Windows x64 applications. While development is ongoing, it’s likely the new Windows 10 on ARM 64-bit support will land next year.
