Launched this week

Windows 11 ARM64 on M1 Mac, not in a VM

Launched this week

Windows 11 ARM64 running on M1 Mac hardware without VM

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Windows 11 ARM64 running on M1 Mac hardware without VM

1 follower

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NWOAS boots Windows 11 ARM64 on an Apple Silicon Mac's own hardware, not inside a VM. Built on m1n1 and Project Mu UEFI (via the AppleWOA forks), it currently runs Windows from an M1 Mac mini's internal SSD alongside macOS Tahoe: all 8 CPU cores active, 15 GB RAM visible, native ARM64 execution scoring 1888 in Cinebench 2026 multi-core. Still research-grade: a second Mac orchestrates boot, and native GPU, networking, standalone boot, and power management are in progress. Fully open source.

Windows 11 ARM64 on M1 Mac, not in a VM gallery image

Free

Launch tags:Windows•Open Source•Developer Tools

Launch Team / Built With

LM-Kit OneThe Private AI Application Server

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OpenAI

GPT-6 Astra Challenge

How did Astra change the scope or ambition of what you built?

Maker

Before Astra, the realistic scope of NWOAS was "reach the Windows installer." I had spent months getting an M1 Mac mini through the m1n1 / Project Mu boot chain and was stuck there: a USB controller that couldn't DMA above 4GB froze the installer, and my previous coding assistant kept flagging firmware work as unsafe, so sessions burned out before producing anything. Handing the project to Codex with GPT-6 Astra changed what a solo student could attempt. Within two weeks the goal moved from "see the installer" to "run Windows 11 for real": booting from the internal SSD next to macOS Tahoe, all eight cores live, ~15GB RAM visible, a full Cinebench 2026 run at 1888 with native ARM64 CPU performance. Astra also brought rigor I wouldn't have imposed on myself: guarded memory layouts, 10GiB word-by-word verification, soak tests, and session records that keep failures next to passes. Native drivers and standalone boot are now on the roadmap. Six months ago they weren't even on the list.

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2d ago

Maker

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I'm Cornch, a CS student in Korea. The question that started this: Windows on ARM exists and Apple Silicon is ARM, so why is the only answer a VM? Asahi Linux showed the hardware could be opened up, and the AppleWOA community had already begun adapting m1n1 and Project Mu for Windows, so I built on that and pushed it stage by stage until Windows 11 actually reached the desktop on my M1 Mac mini. Where it stands today: Windows runs from the internal SSD next to macOS, uses all eight cores and about 15 GB of RAM, and completes a real Cinebench run with native ARM64 CPU performance. Keyboard and trackpad work over USB-A. Where it doesn't yet: it still runs under m1n1's EL2 layer with a second Mac handling boot orchestration, storage goes through an emulated NVMe path, and there are no native GPU or network drivers. I'm being deliberately precise about this because "Windows on M1" gets overclaimed a lot, and every stage in the repo records failures alongside passes. I'm posting it because the next problems — native drivers, standalone boot — are bigger than one person. If you've worked on xHCI, UEFI, hypervisors, or Windows boot internals, the repo has session records and reproducible test results ready for you.

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8d ago