Background
This is the system76 Thelio Astra – configured with 2tb of local storage and 512gb ram. It is a beast – easily the fastest Arm desktop you can get in 2025, and a much better Arm developer experience than other arm-based solutions I’ve tried, including the Qualcomm Arm dev kit that was eventually cancelled/refunded/recalled.
It ships with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, which is where a lot of the testing and development Ampere is doing is first tested.
The arm cores are Neoverse N1, and there are 128 of them at 3.0ghz. As this CPU is designed for server workloads, these CPUs are 3ghz all the time, even when fully loaded.
pre-setup
Apt install all the deps
Windows 11 for Arm
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11arm64
VirtIo ISO for drivers (important!!)
https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/archive-virtio/
I used Index of /groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/archive-virtio/virtio-win-0.1.271-1 for the video.
Virt Manager
Before one does anything, one must enable xml editing. This is because the gui has bugs and wrong assumptions that are worse on the arm platform. We need to edit the xml to solve those issues. Do this first!
Virt manager’s gui has a lot of quirks that have persisted for years. These are worse on the arm platform.
Next, we’ll setup the OS from the iso.
new VM
Idiocy Alert #1
This is a bug I reported years ago, but the ticket was closed. When you pick more cpus here it makes more cpu sockets, not cores. like as if you have a 16 socket system. which is a terrible idea for most modern OSes.
for now leave one cpu but we’ll fix it in another gui later. Please also select a reasonable amount of ram such as 16384 or 32768.
be sure to check customize before install, or it’ll fail anyway with
…turns out hyper-v fixups are not on the arm platform. Seems obvious when one says it out loud…
Idiocy Alert 2
hit the xml tab and delete the section entirely.
This is the cpu configuration I went with:
Additional Setup
For whatever reason it was also necessary to add more console hardware. Spice channel, display spice, and video ramfb.
I had some trouble with keyboard/mouse on the console after that, so I just passed through another different usb mouse and keyboard to the vm.
It was also necessary to copy the arm64 drivers for virtio and virtscsi to a usb memory stick and pass the memory stick to the vm. This is because the win11 arm installer seems not to have any drivers for virtio, emulated sata or scsi…
Setup USB witth virtio drivers
Simply copy the arm64 drivers to a usb stick. Then add hardware and map that usb stick to the vm.
Here I have mounted the iso and copied the needed folders. Wait for the transfer to finish.
Finally, we can begin the installation.
Windows, how do I loathe thee, let me count the ways
This screen is not “cant find disk” it is “cant find cdrom”
Use the browse button, go to the usb with the copy of arm64 and start loading drivers.
Windows Has Bugs Too
Okay so the driver was added to find the usb “cdrom” - but that doesnt survive a reboot. You have to load it here as well or it doesnt survive installation.
You’ll get INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE.
Use load driver on this screen to load the storage driver and other virtio drivers so they’re available on first boot.
FIN
This is pretty cool
Arm VFIO Bonus Round
With Linux working this well on an Ampere workstation with 128 cores, and with IOMMU working, vfio passthrough of PCIe peripherals opens the door to help ease hardware and driver development. In the video I passed throug an Intel AX210 – a device that currently doesn’t have ARM64 drivers – which would make it easier to do device driver development (especially on windows).
Part of the reason for this is Windows doesn’t have a lot of low-level facilities for resetting PCIe devices or resetting hardware peripherals without a reboot whereas rebooting a VM with an assigned pcie device can usually reset either the device or root bridge without issues. The server pedigree of these Ampere CPUs appears to me to mean that this functionality is quite robust – something I can’t always say on competing platforms.
To that end I can also pass through an Nviida RTX 4060 Ti to a virtualized Ubuntu instance and successfully run the ARM64 native nvidia drivers in the VM.
If you are a hardware or driver developer looking to work on the Arm platform it is hard to imagine a better workflow than working on these sorts of problems in a self-contained virtual machine that has real hardware tied to it.
