wimboot hangs on aa64 when booting in a VMware Fusion 25H2 VM

[mtniehaus]

When booting with wimboot 2.9 on a VMware Fusion 25H2 VM, the virtual machine hangs. I've tried three different scenarios:

• Using the embedded bootmgfw* files. This hangs after displaying the message "Secure Boot is disabled".
• Using an extracted bootmgrfw_ex.efi file specified via initrd. The file is loaded fine by iPXE, but wimboot still hangs. If I add a "pause" command line parameter, it displays the expected messages but hangs with a black screen after you press a key.
• Using an extracted bootmgr.efi file specified via initrd. This behaves exactly like bootmgrfw_ex.efi.

The same process works fine on Hyper-V (arm64, run on Windows 11 25H2) and a physical arm64 computer; it seems to only be an issue with VMware Fusion.

[mcb30]

I saw similar behaviour when trying to run arm64 Win11 in QEMU. The issue there was that the QEMU firmware did not provide an EL3 firmware (e.g. ATF) and so when Win11 executed an smc instruction it would crash (or hang) the machine. The same issue could be reproduced by trying to run Win11 in the same VM type but without iPXE.

Have you verified that you are able to boot Windows in the exact same VM if you reconfigure it to boot from a locally attached Win11 ISO that contains exactly the same boot.wim?

[mtniehaus]

Yes, the VM works fine booting from a Windows 11 or Windows PE ISO with a 25H2 image. And if it didn't, I would think VMware would have noticed unless I'm the only person using VMware Fusion 25H2 on ARM64 :-) They do make VMware Fusion available for free through the Broadcom website (after you register). Unfortunately, they don't have a Windows ARM64 version, so the MacOS version is the only option. (Parallels is the better option on MacOS ARM64, but they decided to stop supporting PXE in their recent releases, hence VMware Fusion is the fallback option.)

[mcb30]

Have you tried the rawbcd, rawwim and gui command-line options, to selectively disable the various modifications that wimboot does by default?