Hey NTDEV!

I couldn't think of a better way to reach out, as what I'm asking for is not really related to the tiny11 builder so I opened the issue here. I hope you don't mind.

I'm amazed of the work you've done with these custom builds and I've seen various experiments you've done on YouTube.

I have this use case of a Windows 10/11, maybe even 2016, installed in a VM with the sole purpose of running a driver.

The driver is for a Goodie 521d fingerprint sensor which is only available for Windows 10 and newer. I'd like to get that working in Linux, and reverse engineering efforts are already being made but honestly I don't have my hopes up as these things seem very difficult to reverse engineer and everything is closed source.

So my plan would be to get a Windows VM as small as possible where I can install the driver and have it communicate with the host through virtio sockets.

Requirements:
- Windows Biometrics Framework -> this is the common interface for such drivers. In recent Windows releases it's available as a feature. I'm not sure, but I suspect it might depend on having a desktop interface.
- The dependencies of Windows Biometrics Framework -> There are some services this depends on, but I've generally seen these already built-in and up and running, even in headless Windows installations (maybe apart from the desktop environment).
- Everything else can go, even the networking stack. The aim would be to make this as small as possible in terms of resource consumption (I don't care that much about the disk size)

I tried customizing builds for the following:
- Windows Nano Server (taken from Windows 2016) -> If this worked, it would've been ideal. But unfortunately the Windows Biometrics Framework feature is not available in it and I couldn't figure out a way to install it through DISM. I tried to manually re-create the service and copy the .dll files from a Windows Server 2016 installation, but the service wouldn't run and I couldn't figure out a way to troubleshoot it.
- Windows Server 2016 -> I mainly tried with the headless mode, but the Windows Biometrics Framework is not available unless you install the version that provides a desktop environment.
- Windows Server 2012 -> This version has a headless mode which does have the Windows Biometrics Framework feature, but I believe the release is too old to work with the driver.

I'd like to ask for your help and/or guidance in this. My Windows knowledge is not the best, especially when it comes down to something as niche as this.

If we succeed, I think this would be a great example and baseline for running stuff like this if you really want to/must. I wouldn't mind firing up a VM that only eats up, say, 100MB of RAM. But 2GB or something for a fully functional Windows 10 installation is quite the overkill.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!