Progress report from Qubes developer @omeg

Alright, since I (@omeg) have been working on this for a while now and finally it's in a state that will allow for user testing soon, here is the current status of Windows 10/11 support. More items might be added in case I forgot something.

All of the current code is here: https://github.com/omeg/qubes-installer-windows-tools/tree/omeg/win10
Don't use on production VMs, it's not ready yet. Make sure to set the default-user property for the qube manually as appropriate (#9020).

TODO:

• Core
  • Xen PV drivers
    • Core drivers (xenbus/xeniface)
    • Additional drivers (disk/network for performance)
  • Integration
    • Core services (qrexec agent, qubesdb)
    • qvm-run with passthrough i/o
    • AppIcon extraction
    • Clipboard integration
    • File receiving
    • File sending
    • Shell context menus for file sending and editing in other VMs
    • Initializing the private disk volume
    • Moving user profile to the private disk volume (QWT: redirect known folders instead of relocating user profile #5916)
• GUI agent
  • Secure attention sequence (CTRL-ALT-DEL) simulation
  • Fullscreen mode
    • Basic functionality
    • Resolution change on resize (limited by the basic display driver's hardcoded list of supported resolutions)
  • Seamless mode
    • Basic functionality
    • User account control (UAC) popups (desktop switch)
    • Capturing Start Menu and notifications
    • A way to interact with the tray notification area
• Installer
  • Component selection
  • PV drivers component(s)
  • Core component
  • GUI component
  • Proper versioning
  • Installing prerequisites (MSVC runtime)
• Building (no cross build on Linux possible anymore due to building Xen PV drivers from source)
  • Visual Studio build
  • Standalone build
  • Integration with Qubes builder

Nice to have (will most likely be done after an initial release):

• Release-signing for PV drivers (Release-signing for Windows Xen PV drivers #9019)
• Performance-enhancing OS tuning
• Windows 7/11 compatibility (11 seems to mostly work without issues)
• Seamless mode optimization (moving windows looks laggy)
• A GUI utility for various settings that are configurable via registry
• Custom WDDM GPU driver (for better performance and easier access to DWM-managed window surfaces)

Known issues (will be added to github once the code is merged):

• Stubdomain memory may need to be increased if you encounter Qemu being oom-killed (HVM stub-domain occasionally runs out of memory #3821)
• NTFS symlinks are not handled correctly by file sender
• Rarely some framebuffer changes seem not to be detected correctly in fullscreen mode