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Comment by einsteinx2 | Hacker News Reader

> As you might still remember, I was working on an arm64 macbook and there currently is no sane solutions how to emulate x86 windows on arm macbooks.

What about UTM? Also Parallels recently added initial support for Intel VMs as well.

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The dynarec systems in QEMU aren't as efficient as the native dynarec systems in Windows and macOS (Rosetta 2). You can definitely run x86 Windows with UTM, and it works, but the performance characteristics are pretty poor. From a utility perspective, I've found that running an ARM Windows VM and using Windows' dynarec system to run x86 apps, or using WINE (both using native compiled subsystem code) is a much better experience. It's one of those things where it's okay if you need to run a workload in a pinch.

I'm not sure if performance characteristics are part of what the OP considers "sane", but if it is, I get the position.

I tried UTM and it's unusable for x86 Windows.

Maybe command line Linux would be acceptably slow, but anything with a GUI isn't.

You can run arm64 Windows pretty well, but that's not x86 Windows and won't help with reverse engineering an x86 system component.

I hadn’t tried it myself I just knew it could run it, sucks to hear it’s so unusable.

It depends on what you need though, because arm windows has its own rosetta-like translation and does run x86 applications.

I set up a windows arm inside an UTM VM as a test, then installed visual studio (not code!) which is an x86 application and it was pretty much usable.

The codebase i was working on was complaining about missing some OpenGL parts so I stopped and haven't investigated further (I have x86 boxes for working on it). But depending on your requirements the above setup may be just fine(tm).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the emulation of an MMU-equipped CPU a fundamentally slow and unoptimizable task? Apple's Rosetta and its Microsoft equivalent only work as fast as they do because they only run userspace code so they don't have to emulate the MMU.

I wouldn't go as far as to say unoptimizable, but it's certainly harder, particularly if your emulator is running in userspace (like Rosetta does).

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