A docker container to run Windows commands and processes. On first run it will generate a Windows 11 ISO and run a VM to install it and create a system snapshot. On subsequent runs it will use the existing cached VM image.
docker run -it --rm --device=/dev/kvm -v $(pwd)/cache:/cache ghcr.io/lg/osrun 'dir c:\windows\system32'Usage: osrun [-v] [-h] <command>
Short-lived containerized Windows instances
-h --help: Display this help
-v --verbose: Verbose mode
Install
-k --keep: Keep the installation cached artifacts after successful provisioning
Run
-p --pause: Do not close the VM after the command finishes
If you don't have kvm on your machine, you can skip the parameter, but things will be a lot slower. This mode is currently unreliable and may freeze during Windows 11 installation.
This container uses QEMU to run a Windows 11 VM. Windows 11 is built with the file list from UUP dump and files are downloaded directly from Microsoft's Windows Update servers. The UUP dump script generates a Windows ISO which we then inject an autounattend.xml script to start the installation automation. To keep the resultant VM small and fast we remove a lot of the default Windows components and services including Windows Defender, Windows Update, most default apps, and also disable things like paging, sleep and hibernation, plus the hard drive is compressed and trimmed to be <10GB. This image and VM state is then snapshotted and saved to a cache directory so that subsequent runs can use the cached VM state to startup quickly. On a reasonably fast machine the installation process takes about 20 minutes end-to-end and runs take about 3-4 seconds for simple commands like dir.
Communication between the VM and the host is done via the QEMU Agent and a QEMU-started Samba server (available in the host container in /tmp/qemu-status or in the VM in \\10.0.2.4\qemu). During installation and execution, multiple debugging services are started (you'll need to forward these ports using Docker if you want to use them):