Windows 10s is out now. According to their documentation, you are promoted to upgrade when a regular application is attempted to be installed. This means trying to install ARC will prompt to upgrade windows pro.

Why they upgrade to pro and not home was a mystery until now. It's because pro unlocks the virtualization features of the operating system.

Home has no virtualization.

Right and pro would also be good because you can RDP into the device which isnt an option without additional software on Home.

Here is an article on the differences between Windows 10s and Windows 10 on ARM

http://www.techradar.com/news/a-closer-look-at-windows-10-s-windows-10-on-arm-and-windows-10-iot#

Frank - that's a fantastic article. Thanks for sharing!

I'm having trouble understanding this paragraph.. It says there is one restriction, but i don't seem to see the restriction in the paragraph....

Quote:

Windows 10 running on ARM processors will be very much like Windows 10 itself, with only one main restriction. You’ll be able to run apps from the Windows Store on Windows on ARM, but you’ll also be able to run Win32 apps - whether they come from the Windows Store because they’ve been packaged with the Desktop Bridge tool, or whether you download them from the web at large and install them as normal desktop apps.

Quote:

Confusingly, Microsoft and Qualcomm are simply calling this Windows 10’. What you get is Windows 10, with the Windows 10 desktop, but it’s Windows 10 running on ARM rather than on an Intel or AMD CPU. In practice, the only difference will be that 64-bit desktop software won’t run on these devices.

Quote:

Just because an app’ comes from the Windows Store does not automatically mean it’s safe and suitable for running on Windows 10 S, explained senior program manager Rich Turner. Similarly, converted apps that generate code and write it to disk won’t run properly on systems running Windows 10 S. So Minecraft will work, but a developer tool like Visual Studio won’t.

@dj I think the problem is that the author did not state the restriction until the next paragraph... i.e. no x64 software

Quote:

Windows 10 running on ARM processors will be very much like Windows 10 itself, with only one main restriction. You’ll be able to run apps from the Windows Store on Windows on ARM, but you’ll also be able to run Win32 apps - whether they come from the Windows Store because they’ve been packaged with the Desktop Bridge tool, or whether you download them from the web at large and install them as normal desktop apps.

Windows on ARM has a built-in emulator for 32-bit apps that’s based on the Windows on Windows (WOW) technology that Windows 10 uses to run 32-bit (x86) software on 64-bit (x64) PCs. The real-time Just-In-Time’ transcoding emulation that converts x86 instructions to ARM is done the first time you run the software, and then it’s cached by Windows - so the next time you run the software, you’re running the ARM64 version of the code that was created on-the-fly the first time, making it run without significant lag or delay.

Which, as you stated, not an issue for ARC... great news

So ARC on an arm based system seems like a possibility with win10 ARM. Good to here for those trying to put Raspberry pi's in there robots!

I doubt raspberry pi will be a target for windows 10. It's super underpowered. I believe the instruction set that snap dragon uses for microsofts arm emulation has more hardware instructions for emulation than Broadcom'a chips. Many companies license the arm instruction set, but also add to it. I believe that's why snapdragon leads performance in arm cpus.

Have you tried an x86 emulator on a pi running windows? If you shut down all host OS services, I wonder how it performs

Doesn't look like you have a lot of options. But some virtualization can be assisted by isolating a core: https://blog.flexvdi.com/2015/03/17/enabling-kvm-virtualization-on-the-raspberry-pi-2/

Out of the box, doesn't seem the pi kernel has any kvm optimization.