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Did you know that EVE is currently the only way to get Xen to run on a Raspberry Pi? 

Well, now EVE is the simplest way to get Windows 10 running on a Raspberry Pi.

Written by:  Petr Fedchenkov LF Edge Lead Developer, Vladimir Suvorov LF Edge R&D Lead, and Aaron Williams, Community Manager and Developer Advocate for LF Edge.

To get Windows 10 running on a Raspberry Pi is actually quite easy, but right now there are a couple of limitations that we know of, and probably a couple more that we don't know about yet. But we wanted to get this out there so our community could start playing with it and help us improve upon what we already have.  This was taken from and expanded from our instructions on how to get started with Eden on Github.

Limitations:

  • need to run it via RDP or VNC
  • Not sure if the RPi's Bluetooth or WiFi is working

What you need:

  • RPi 4 B+ 8GB
  • 128 GB SD card
  • Networking cable
  • Laptop (these instructions are for a Mac, and we will soon improve them for Windows and Linux, but you probably can make some adjustments and get it working)

More Detail and where to get the items

  • RPi 4 B- 8 GB is better, 4 GB will work, but it is slow.  
    • This kit has everything that you need, minus the SD card
  • 32GB SD card (at least), you will want a fast one for a camera, this one is 128 GB
  • You will need your RPi to be plugged into a network at least to start off. I plugged mine into a small 4 port router, and that is plugged into a wireless repeater for my home wifi.
  • Networking cable- I have two, one for RPI to the router and one from the router to the wireless repeater (I am running multiple RPis, hence the router)


Instructions for a Mac

Assumptions:

  • Need Go installed (version 1.15.3)
  • Need docker community (version 2.5.0.1)
  • Qemu- version 4 or greater


Step 0: Setting up your SD card

The first thing that you need to do is to format your SD card.  The easiest way is just to go and get the SD Card Formatter app.

Once you have formatted your disk, lets get it ready for EVE.

  1. find your SD cards disk and unmount it

    diskutil list
    diskutil unmountDisk /dev/<diskname> //mine is diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2

  2. We are going to write 0's (zeros) 1 GB - just incase the SD Card Formatter doesn't do a good job 

    sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<diskName> bs=1m count=1000 //mine is sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m count=1000
    The above step can take a couple of minutes with out feedback from the command line (mine took just over one minute)


Step 1: Install EVE on Raspberry Pi 

EVE will act as the OS for the RPi.  You then can add your own containerized OS and application(s) on top of it. 

Prepare Raspberry image

  1. On your computer, navigate in your terminal application to the location where you would like place EVE and Eden
  2. Clone Eden's github

    git clone https://github.com/lf-edge/eden.git
    cd eden

  3. Build Eden

    make clean   <--This cleans up if you have already built something and does nothing if you haven't 
    make build



  4. *Optional: Add the xen flag if you want to use Xen as your hypervisor, skip to step 5 if you want to use kvm

    ./eden config add default --devmodel RPi4
    ./eden config set default --key eve.hv --value xen

  5. *Optional: Enable WiFi
    ./eden config add default --devmodel RPi4 --ssid <mywifinet>   //no quotation marks around the SSID or Password unless there is a space

  6. Build the EVE image and start eden
    ./eden setup
    ./eden start

The output of 'setup' will produce the file 'live.img, which is the image file that you will put on the RPi's SD card

Copy the Image to the SD Card

MacOS:

diskutil list
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/<your_disk_name> <--your disk might be unmounted already if you haven't removed after step 0
sudo dd bs=1m if=fullpath_of_your_image.img of=/dev/<your_disk_name>; sync 
sudo diskutil eject /dev/<your_disk_name>

The copying might take a minute or two, depending on your machine.  You will not see anything on the screen until it is done. 

Step 2: Onboarding the RPi and Running a Small Application to Test It

  1. unplug anything attached to the USB on the RPi (keyboards, mouse, etc.)
  2. Put in SD card into Raspberry and power it on
  3. Onboard our RPi into eden so that we can control it remotely
    On the terminal window of your computer, type:

    ./eden eve onboard
    This can take 5 minutes. It will output a large JSON file when it is done.  
    When your RPi is onboarded, type the below to get the status of Eden
    ./eden status

  4. Deploy the nginx server, as a test

    ./eden pod deploy -p 8028:80 docker://nginx

  5. run eden's status command to get the RPi's IP address
    It is listed under "EVE REMOTE IPs"

    ./eden status

  6. Open a browser and point it to http://EVE's_IP_Address:8028


Step 3:  Pushing Windows to your RPi

  1. The final part is to push Windows from Eden to EVE on your RPi.
    ./eden pod deploy -p 8027:3389 docker://itmoeve/eci-windows:2004-compressed-arm64  --vnc-display=1 --memory=6GB --cpus=2

    The memory = 6 GB flag means that you are telling EVE to give Windows 6 GB of RAM, thus if you are running on a 4 GB RPi, you will want to reduce this to 3 GB.  The more memory that you give to Windows, the better it will perform, but you will want to save 1 GB for EVE.  EVE only needs a little less than 500 MB, but save 1 GB.  Also, remember if you are going to put other applications on your RPi via EVE (say you want to also install Ubuntu), you will need to save memory for them.
    This is the longest part of the install.  It can take about an hour to download and then about 10-15 min for it to be installed and ready to go.
  2. Deploying Windows to EVE will take a while.  To check on the progress, use the pod ps command.
    ./eden pod ps
    The results will start with the "percent downloaded", then "loading", "creating volume", and "finally running".

Step 4: Using Microsoft's Remote Desktop to Connect to Your Pi 

  1. Download and install RDP for your OS from here.
  2. When you set up your connection make sure you use the port 8027. (XX.XX.XX.XX:8027)

Step 4b:  Using VNC to Remote into Your Pi

You will need to download VNC to your laptop.  Then the use the IP address of your Pi, plus the port of 5901→ 192.123.1.14:5901

Step 5: Play

You now have Windows running on a Raspberry Pi!  Pretty cool, eh?  Please visit us on slack to tell us what you have done.  
This was mostly done as a PoC, so we are really looking for help from the community to improve this project.  Here are some ideas from us:

  • You could see school computer classes using this type of thing.  The teach sets up the environment they need/want and then at the end of the day, would be able to reset all of their machines.  Thus, your help could make this a reality for them. 
  • What about Android? or Ubuntu?  (yes for Ubuntu you could put it natively on the RPi, but if you are running an event with 10-50 RPi's, it would be much nicer to reset everything via EVE than to re-burn all of the SD cards.)
  • What about running EdgeX or Fledge on Eden/EVE?  The instructions would basically work.  We just need to work on what ports to turn on. 


Limitations/things we haven't tested as of Nov 25, 2020

  • Lining up of the mouse.  This is really a limitation of VNC
  • WiFi/Bluetooth-  We haven't tested using the native WiFi or the native Bluetooth on the device, but it doesn't seem to be working
  • When the Pi is plugged into a monitor, you see EVE and not windows.  We are working on this.
    • Plugging in a keyboard and mouse interacts with EVE (same as above) 
  • GPIO pins, they might work, but the limitation is probably on Windows.  We need to test this.



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