Omarchy for Windows on Hyper-V with GPU acceleration

(this setup isn't limited to Omarchy, but that is what I'm trying to run today)

I wanted to try Omarchy in a VM to see what all the fuss is about, but no hardware to dedicate at the moment, and all I could use as host was this Windows machine.

However, because this box also uses WSL2, Windows is already running on Hyper-V, which makes the easy options work badly or not at all.

If you are NOT running Windows on Hyper-V (if you're using WSL2, you are), this repo might be overkill for you. Might still work, though.

• Running as a proper Hyper-V guest doesn't virtualize GPU
• Running on QEMU/KVM inside WSL2 could in theory give us GPU rendering, then blitted into a buffer, and WSLg/RDP/VNC'd to a window, which is also not ideal
• Running on VMware... idk I don't run VMware
• Running on VirtualBox... idk I don't run VirtualBox
• Running on basic QEMU doesn't give us much of GPU either

Use WINQ-EMU as base to get GPU working, and keep tinkering until stuff works. My first attempts required many QEMU flag customizations, and everything was still unusably slow and jittery. Bummer.

I eventually figured out the problems were interrupt related. Long story short, QEMU 11 fixes things over QEMU 10 that we need to get interrupts working correctly under Hyper-V, but at the same time broke QEMU startup on targets such as exactly my setup.

To that end, we patch the binaries from WINQ-EMU to nop some ifs, the flags we need now work, and everything runs fast and with GPU. See the patch/ directory for sources for the patch, which contains further details.

• Download and install WINQ-EMU Alpha 10. Do NOT use a different version, it MUST be Alpha 10. I am going to assume you installed to C:\WINQ-EMU which is the default.
• Download the Omarchy Quattro ISO and save it to the vm directory of your WINQ-EMU install.
• Download the ZIP of this repo (Code drop-down button above the file listing, select Download ZIP)
• Extract omarchy.bat and the patch directory from the ZIP into your WINQ-EMU directory

Now, again assuming you installed to C:\WINQ-EMU, you should have at least these new files:

• C:\WINQ-EMU\vm\omarchy-4.0.0.iso
• C:\WINQ-EMU\patch\whpx_nested_patch.exe
• C:\WINQ-EMU\omarchy.bat

At the top of omarchy.bat you can configure your setup. Defaults are 4 CPU, 8 GB RAM, and 64 GB disk. If you want to change those, do that before continuing.

The omarchy.bat file should setup everything for you at first run, patching QEMU, creating EFI vars, and creating your disk (pre-allocating!). It will then boot into the Omarchy installer. When that is complete, you need to start omarchy.bat again to actually start Omarchy.

Et voila, a fully GPU accelerated Omarchy instance on your Windows-on-Hyper-V box. If you're lucky!

All of this takes about 5 minutes start to finish.

• At Omarchy boot, immediately after the boot selection, you may be greeted by a black screen. It is probably waiting for your disk decryption password but the prompt is invisible. Pressing ENTER usually fixes that.
• Hyprland sometimes errors during boot, you'll get a flickering black screen, or nothing at all. Ctrl+Alt+F2, login, sudo systemctl restart sddm.
• There are some if ands buts with WINQ-EMU's GPU support. I do recommend you check the repo.
• Chromium (and anything Chromium based) is known to have some issues. Recommend setting Firefox as your browser in Omarchy, or forcing software rendering for Chromium things; if you must run Chromium, be sure to disable hardware video decoding in chrome://flags.
• Virtualization inside Omarchy probably does not work (QEMU and friends).

See scripts/autoresize/

git clone this repo inside your installation, and run the installer. Now the resolution of Omarchy follows the size of the QEMU window.

Notes:

• Ctrl+Alt+F full-screens QEMU
• Not resizing the window at all until the GUI is fully loaded is advised

This works for me on my AMD 9950x3D + Nvidia 4090, Windows 11 Pro 21H2. In Windows Security -> Device Security -> Core Isolation, I have Memory Integrity turned OFF. Claude feels that is relevant information, having it ON might stop all this from working - or it might not!