Here’s Windows 11 running on Android 13 in a virtual machine

A developer, "kdrag0n", managed to get Windows 11 running on the Pixel 6 smartphone in a virtual machine. He has updated his device to the latest Android 13 developer preview OS. Sadly, this involves a lot of work, but still quite impressive.
As you may already know, under the hood of the Android OS is Linux kernel with patches and hardware specific drivers. What kdrag0n did is used KVM to provide a virtual environment for Windows 11. Google itself is using something similar for adding Linux app support to Chrome OS.

Bringing a virtual environment for Windows 11 on Android is a complicated procedure. First of all, you need to root your device. Kdrag0n has managed to find that one can get the Exception Level 2 hypervisor privilege level to the kernel thanks to the Android 13 bootloader and firmware for the Tensor platform.

The Exception Level 2 hypervisor privilege level is available in the the kernel for the protected KVM feature (pKVM). The pKVM option itself is optional, and need to be activated for each VM individually. So one can easily exploit the full KVM functionality on non-protected VMs.

Traditionally for such research cases, kdrag0n tried the classic Doom game and it works. (via XDA)

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

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