Windows on ARM

[stokehall]

@george1421 I have had some small success on testing and with Oracular Desktop from 16th Sept I have managed to get it to the language selection on instal with the GUI, however it is not taking any inputs so it is definitely not a working image but it is closer than anything else so far. I have not been able to get any Linux to get any further than a small underscore on physical hardware but over VM I am able to reach the language. I can see that the system has not crashed, as the clock is updating although only if i close and reopen the VM.
This was accessed from here but I have not managed to get the 190924 version to work yet and cannot see the one I used listed: https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/

I fixed my TFTP issues and upgraded the kernel but as expected it is still not going any further in FOG.

[rodluz]

@stokehall Thank you for the update. I didn’t think Ubuntu was going to start using kernel 6.11 for their 24.10 release, but it seems like they are, so I’ll take a look over the weekend.

[george1421]

@stokehall Just a quick oracular review and it will eventually ship with linux kernel 6.11, and it kind of works with the latest ARM processors. But we are getting close and kernel 6.11 is probably a good place to start. We might want to start with the default config for the qualcom processors and then add in the bits that FOG needs. Linux kernel 6.11 was released on 15-Sep.

[stokehall]

@rodluz @george1421 Have you had any progress with this project?

[rodluz]

@stokehall @george1421 I have the 6.11 kernel booting, however I am unable to get the keyboard and networking working. It seems like this keyboard issue is also affecting Linux distributions trying to build for the X1 SOCs like Ubuntu.
I have not been able to test anything on the init (imaging, registering, etc) because of the networking and keyboard issue. Also, Buildroot has not updated their linux headers to include 6.11 so I can build the new init needed.

[stokehall]

@rodluz That is strangely reassuring that you are seeing the same result I was, I did worry that I was doing something wrong or was unlucky when my inputs were not registering. I guess there is still a bit of work to be done to get this working. Hopefully the 6.11 supported linux headers drop soon.

[george1421]

@rodluz Good going. I also saw the issues with the lenovo’s ARM notebooks. I think we may need to wait until 6.12 is released. Yeah, without networking or keyboard you are kind of stuck. I was thinking that we could just ssh into the fos engine to bypass the keyboard issue, but then no network and no way to set root’s password. That would have to be done using buildroot to assign a default password to root. Not worth the effort until you get keyboard access. I just has a flash of an idea of a serial console, but that system probably doesn’t have a real serial port either.

[stokehall]

@george1421 This seems positive, looks like we may have a working solution by the end of the year. Unfortunately as the laptops we are testing this on are the CEO’s and CTO’s new ones, I will not be able to keep hold of them much longer and so they will be unavailable for testing in 2 weeks time. I will keep following the progress of this forum but wont be able to lend a hand to testing.

[MarkG]

Resurrecting this topic. I now have myself a Lenovo ThinkCentre Neo 50q, which has a Snapdragon CPU. I’ve updated my FOG to the latest (1.5.10.1698) and updated my ARM kernel and inits to the cutting edge version (6.12.35 from Sep 19th 2025). I can boot to a FOG menu but when I choose the ‘Compatability’ option it gets this far and then reboots:

Looks as though the kernel just won’t boot. I have this machine now for as long as I need it and am prepared to put some effort in to help get this working. Any pointers? I have built linux kernels in the past, though not for 10 years or so.

[Tom Elliott]

@MarkG Can you increase the Loglevel and see if the kernel is spewing out anything?

I believe on the GUI there’s a loglevel under FOG Configuration->FOG Settings->Kernel Loglevel or something like it.

It’s defaulted to 4, but if you increase it, it should make the logging a bit more verbose.

I’m not holding my breath, but it’s worth a shot at least. Hopefully there’s more information we might glean if there’s anythign hidden due to the lower log level.

[MarkG]

@Tom-Elliott thanks for the quick response. No joy though.

I’ve been and tried an Ubuntu live iso with a 6.14 kernel from the Ubuntu Concept Snapdragon Elite branch (https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/faq-ubuntu-25-04-on-snapdragon-x-elite/61016) and even that doesn’t boot - though it gets as far as telling me it can’t create a device tree. So I guess I’m just going to have to be patient while upstream gets this whole SoC working.