As mentioned in my recent posting about running Windows 11 on unsupported hardware I got today a hint from a reader of this website that it is indeed possible to run Windows 11 in KVM. KVM allows to specify UEFI and also the emulation of a TPM 2.0 module, even without having a real TPM chip on the machine. This is the case for my workstation running Fedora 34.
What I did was to install Windows 10 in an KVM image and specify the following:
- Emulated TPM 2.0 module
2. Instruct KVM to load the image via UEFI
But that wasn’t enough to fully get Windows 11, though. For that to work it is necessary to “convince” the Windows 11 installer to skip the CPU check as well.
I started regedit.exe on the Windows 10 machine. And navigated to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup.
Then I created the new DWORD value AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU and set its value to 1.
Then the Windows 11 installer started without problems and after an additional warning about my (of course) unsupported setup it started the installation. So hey, I’m back testing Windows 11 stuff in my lab.
