Recently a thought came to my mind. We live in the year 2025, virtualization has come very far thanks to the cloud and WSL2 works pretty good now. Surely it must have become easy and reasonably performant to create a Linux VM on Windows and use that for development work. Let’s even try to use Hyper-V since that is something the Microsoft Azure Platform is build on.

Creating a VM in Hyper-V⌗

This step is actually pretty easy. Microsoft has a very minimal and good documentation on how to do it. You just need to follow the steps in the Hyper-V VM creation wizard.

After that is done, open the VM settings, search for “Integration Services” and then make sure to check the “Guest services” checkbox.

Intializing the Linux VM⌗

After you install the guest OS with the ISO, make sure to not forget to eject the ISO drive or else Hyper-V will load it again.

If you only want to run a Linux VM that has 0 contact with the host OS, then you done. You don’t need to read further. However, usually you want to share files, devices and other resources with the host OS. And that is exactly why I made this blog post. It is not really straight forward to share these resources on a newly created VM. I am not sure why though since Hyper-V is a rather advanced Hypervisor. Well, it is Windows in the end so lets just dive into what we need, to make sure we have a somewhat pleasant desktop VM experience.

From what I could gather Hyper-V does not provide a native way to share the resources. Hyper-V has something called “enhanced session mode”. This mode enables the VM to use / share some host OS resources like network connections, drives and audio devices. But where is the catch? Well, for all these features we are required to use the RDP protocol. Yes, you read it correctly. For some reason Microsoft did not think it would be good to provide these features out-of-the-box but rely on the RDP protocol. At least for me, that is a very weird decision.

This brings us to the next step. To be able to even activate the “enhanced session mode” for a VM, you need to install and configure a RDP server on your Linux VM. Otherwise it will simply not work.

RDP and Xorg⌗

This blog post is about setting up the i3 window manager in a VM on Windows. i3 is built on top of Xorg but Xorg itself does not implement the RDP protocol nor does it understand it. So we need to install something called xrdp. You don’t need to know much about it except it enables Xorg to understand the RDP protocol. Or to be more precise, xrdp acts as a frontend and Xorg will act as the backend.

Actual setup⌗

  1. The first thing to do after the first boot is to install the following packages:

    sudo dnf install xrdp xrdp-selinux xorgxrdp hyperv-daemons

    This will install the required services needed to run a RDP server with Xorg as the backend. The hyperv-daemons package is something very essential here. It installs a couple of daemons that enable clipboard integration and other important features.

  2. Before starting the xrdp server, you need to optimize some of its configuration.

    The following sed commands will handle the optimizations for you:

    sudo sed -i_orig 's/port=3389/port=vsock:\/\/-1:3389/g' /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini
sudo sed -i_orig 's/security_layer=negotiate/security_layer=rdp/g' /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini
sudo sed -i_orig 's/crypt_level=high/crypt_level=none/g' /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini
sudo sed -i_orig 's/bitmap_compression=true/bitmap_compression=false/g' /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini

  3. One of they daemons installed by hyperv-daemons will automatically mount

    all drives that are shared with the VM into your home directory. The default name for the mount directory is not very nice. The next sed command renames it to shared-drives.

    sudo sed -i 's/FuseMountName=thinclient_drives/FuseMountName=shared-drives/g' /etc/xrdp/sesman.ini

  4. Allow everyone to create X server sessions (required because of RDP):

    sudo tee /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config >/dev/null <<EOL
needs_root_rights=no
allowed_users=anybody
EOL

  5. Make sure the Hyper-V specific kernel module is enabled:

    echo "hv_sock" | sudo tee /etc/modules-load.d/hv_sock.conf
# Make sure VMware kernel module is blacklisted
echo "blacklist vmw_vsock_vmci_transport" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-vmw_vsock_vmci_transport.conf

  6. Enable the xrdp service and shutdown the VM:

    sudo systemctl enable xrdp
sudo systemctl enable xrdp-sesman
poweroff

  7. Enable enhanced session mode for the VM (run this as Administrator in powershell):

    Set-VM "VM NAME" -EnhancedSessionTransportType HVSocket

Now you can start the VM again. A new dialog should now pop up asking you about resolution. Congrats! You are done! Now you should be able to run the VM in enhanced session mode and share OS resources with your VM.

There is one remaining issue which I could not solve yet. When using Xorg as the backend for xrdp, the screen is blurry and pixilated on heavy load. This is very weird especially because a friend of mine, who uses Arch Linux, can’t reproduce this behaviour. I will update this blog once I find a solution to this issue or if I understand why this even happens.