I happen to own a 13″ Macbook Pro from 2015 (i7, 8GB, 256GB SSD) as my daily driver. I decided I wanted to test out Windows 11 from a clean install as well as the improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Unfortunately, the laptop is too old to have a compatible Trusted Platform Module (TPM v. 2.0) to pass the hardware checks to install Windows 11. This required a visit to https://github.com/AveYo/MediaCreationTool.bat for a workaround to create installation media as the Microsoft-provided fix will only allow you to install if you have TPM v1.2 and this generation of Macbook has no TPM at all. The tool was dead simple to use and Windows 11 not only installed but updated as well with no issues. Crisis averted for now … until I wanted to start installing the additional Windows features required for WSL and found them greyed out.
The problem here is that the NVRAM doesn’t enable hardware virtualization by default and no amount of resetting it will make it so. The traditional route would be to dual-boot macOS and Windows 11 using BootCamp and BootCamp will set the proper flags in the NVRAM. I’ve never liked BootCamp and in the past I’ve always relied on the rEFInd boot manager available here : https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ and casually dealt with the odd occasion that virtualization wouldn’t work in Windows because a reboot would usually sort it out.
As I wasn’t expecting to be dual-booting for the time being, I did not have rEFInd installed and spent a ton of time Googling the answer (which was always resetting the NVRAM or BootCamp or both). It turns out there’s a flag in rEFInd in the config file called ‘enable_and_lock_vmx’ that when uncommented and set to ‘true’ will resolve the issue. I then learned how to install rEFInd from Windows and solved the second piece of this puzzle.
Windows 11 is pretty. WSL is improved. It comes with Terminal by default. However, I’m not going to lie about my experience a mere two days into the test drive. I also had to edit the registry twice and implement yet another github sourced hack to get the taskbar, start menu, and context menus back to working the way they had in the past. I could gripe about the ever-evolving relocation of settings but if you’re shocked by this then you haven’t been using Windows long enough. I’m more concerned with the fact that shutting these things off never occurred to them as something you might want to do without this level of effort.
cultofack 