Is it possible to run windows on a router?

[Yyisok]

I was just thinking

[AbydosOne]

3 minutes ago, Yyisok said:

I was just thinking

Why?

 

Quote

Is it possible to run windows on a router?

If your router is an x86 PFSense box, yeah. Otherwise, without skills/requisite knowledge, no.

[WkdPaul]

as @AbydosOne said, depends on the router.

If you use a PC as a router, then yeah. If you mean a Linksys / D-Link / TP-Link router, then no.

 

Though, you could gut one, put an Intel Compute Stick in it and then pretend it's a router ...

[KemoKa]

49 minutes ago, Yyisok said:

I was just thinking

Nope.

 

A lot of routers don't even run on ARM, let alone x86. They're based on MIPS. Even if Windows were hypothetically ported to MIPS, it wouldn't be able to run because the resources routers have are tiny.

 

You can have an old x86 machine run PFSense and technically you'd have a router that can run Windows, but if you wanted them running on the same machine at the same time... running PFSense in a VM with hardware passthrough is a can of worms I wouldn't want to open. But I don't think that's what you were asking. 

 

[WereCatf]

7 minutes ago, KemoKa said:

A lot of routers don't even run on ARM, let alone x86. They're based on MIPS. Even if Windows were hypothetically ported to MIPS, it wouldn't be able to run because the resources routers have are tiny

I've seen an uptick in ARM-based routers, but that may just be confirmation-bias on my part. Anyways, e.g. the Linksys-router I have is a 1.6GHz dual-core ARM with 512MB RAM and there's even a SATA II - port accessible for use. While the CPU might be good enough for running Windows 10 ARM rather slowly, the lack of RAM would be an issue and the lack of a GPU would be a complete show-stopper -- routers don't typically come with those built-in!

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Networking

[charlie_root]

If your questions is whether you can use Windows as a router, the answer is yes. You'll need any computer that can run Windows and 2 ethernet ports. Here's one post explaining it with Windows Server 2019: https://msftwebcast.com/2020/02/configure-windows-server-2019-as-a-nat-router.html

 

If your question is whether you can install Windows onto a given router, then the answer is maybe. Consumer routers are rarely (if ever) i386 or amd64 based. There are some commercial/enterprise network appliances that are, and these would probably run Windows. Lanner makes some, for example.