Cygwin AArch64 testing with Windows AArch64 on qemu?

Tue Jun 17 17:05:34 GMT 2025

On 2025年6月17日, Sebastian Feld via Cygwin wrote:
> Now that Microsoft is porting Cygwin to Aarch64:
>> Do you know how to run Windows Aarch64 in qemu, so people can test
> Cygwin Aarch64 changes?
>> Sebi

Yes, but as others have said it is too slow to really be practical.
What I've done lately is use WinPE - they added an option to install x64
emulation support in 24H2, and this runs OK in qemu and can run Cygwin.
https://github.com/jeremyd2019/winpebuilder
Unfortunately, I think the license of WinPE disallows redistributing, so I
have this GHA workflow to build a nice little package, I download the
artifact, and then delete it immediately to try not to violate the
license.
I have run Windows on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and 4, but 24H2 now
requires instruction sets that are not present in that hardware so 23H2 is
the newest release you can run on there. I don't have a pi 5, and don't
know if the drivers and efi firmware have caught up with that yet.
GHA now has windows-on-arm runners, so that is really going to be a boon
to open-source developers who don't have access to the hardware.
https://github.com/actions/partner-runner-images?tab=readme-ov-file#windows-11-by-arm-limited