Reading the installation files through QEMU's emulated USB CD-ROM runs at a
few MB/s on macOS. --install-from-img FILE (or WIN11_VM_INSTALL_IMG) attaches
an installation disk image built by vm-images/build-windows-install-disk.sh as
an NVMe disk instead, which is read about 15 times faster. The image is
attached with snapshot=on because NVMe cannot report write protection and
Windows fails on a read-only volume.
Add windows11-arm64-install-speed.md with the analysis and measurements.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Pick qemu-system-aarch64, the AArch64 UEFI firmware and a per-architecture
QEMU config (NVMe disk, virtio-net, ramfb, USB installation media) on arm64,
render the answer file for the target architecture, and move the q35-only
disk and NIC devices out of the shared config. Update vm-images to match
arm64 Windows ISO names.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A [netdev] in a -readconfig file does not stop QEMU from adding its
default NIC, so the guests had a second user-mode network without the
SSH port forward. Both NICs got 10.0.2.15 over DHCP, and SSH only worked
on boots where the forwarded NIC won the race for the default route.
Removing the default NIC shifts the other PCI devices down one slot, so
existing VMs may need their UEFI variable store reset to boot again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
guofangandClaude Sonnet 5.5