Here’s A Proper Install Of Windows 10 Running On A Raspberry Pi 3

I know what you’re thinking. It’s just the cut-down, IoT version we’ve been able to play with for years now. Nope — this is the Windows 10, built for the compact computer’s ARM64 architecture. Sure, there’s not a lot you can do with it on a Pi, and it’s not exactly stable, but it does works.

An enterprising fellow by the name of Bas Timmer, based in the Netherlands, managed to get Windows 10 up and running on a Raspberry Pi 3 a few days ago. He doesn’t go into detail about how, but he has shared a few screenshots.

For one, due to lack of firmware support, only one core (of four) of the Pi 3’s ARM Cortex-A53 is used. Not only that, it’s constantly maxed out.

Just look at that lovely Windows ARM64 desktop (on the same old RPi3)… ♥️ pic.twitter.com/rICyWNYVdM — NTAuthority (@NTAuthority) February 7, 2018

Also, it looks like there’s a check for unsupported processors, despite the fact the OS goes alright. Twitter conversation on the error suggests it’s caused by missing CPU instructions, rather than the hardware itself being incompatible.

UNSUPPORTED_PROCESSOR bugcheck just happened randomly and I have no debugger attached of course. This is silly. It boots, it runs, clearly some random check. — NTAuthority (@NTAuthority) February 7, 2018

If you’re wondering how this is even possible, Microsoft announced an ARM64 version of Windows 10 a while back. Hopefully, it won’t be long before you can do this without having to jump through so many hoops.

[Twitter, via WinFuture]