Summary of the issue

After migrating my Unraid system to new hardware (Intel Alder Lake), Home Assistant OS (HAOS) no longer boots as a VM.
The VM consistently hangs at:

Booting from Hard Disk...

or drops directly into UEFI Interactive Shell.

This happens with:

• existing HAOS disks (from previous working system)

• fresh HAOS images

• SeaBIOS and OVMF

• Q35 and i440fx machine types

The same HAOS VM worked perfectly for years on the previous server.

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Previous hardware (HAOS VM worked perfectly)

• Dell PowerEdge T320

• CPU: Xeon E5-2470 v2 (8 cores / 16 threads)

• RAM: 96 GB DDR3

• Classic server platform (no hybrid cores)

• HAOS running as a VM without any issues

• Unraid 7.2.3

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Current hardware (problematic)

• CPU: Intel Alder Lake (12th gen)

  • Hybrid architecture (P-cores + E-cores)

• Motherboard: Z690 chipset

• RAM: DDR4

• NVMe: WD_BLACK SN7100 1TB

• NIC: Intel I225-V

• Integrated GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 770

• Unraid 7.2.3

IOMMU is enabled and working correctly.

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VM configuration tested

I have tested multiple combinations, including:

• Machine types:

  • Q35

  • i440fx

• BIOS:

  • SeaBIOS

  • OVMF (UEFI)

• Disk formats:

  • .qcow2

  • .img

• Images tested:

  • Fresh HAOS x86_64 images downloaded from GitHub releases

• Boot order: correct (disk first)

• Network: virtio-net (no IP ever appears)

• CPU pinning: tested pinned and unpinned

• vCPU count: 1–4 cores

• RAM: 4 GB+

Result is always the same:

• Either stuck on “Booting from Hard Disk…”

• Or dropped into UEFI shell, even though EFI files exist (bootx64.efi, grub.cfg)

Manually launching EFI binaries from the shell results in:

Command Error Status: Unsupported

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Additional confirmation

I followed a YouTube tutorial that uses the same VM specs (Q35 + OVMF + HAOS image).
On my system, it also drops to the UEFI shell, exactly the same behavior.

This suggests the issue is not image-specific and not configuration-specific.

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Question to the community

Is anyone successfully running Home Assistant OS as a VM on Alder Lake (hybrid P/E cores) on Unraid 7.x?

• Is this a known incompatibility between HAOS and newer hybrid CPUs?

• Is there any recommended workaround?

• Or is the advised path now to run Home Assistant via Docker instead of HAOS VM on this hardware?

At this point I am considering moving to Home Assistant (Docker) and restoring my backup there, but I wanted to check with the community first in case this is a known limitation or has a confirmed fix.

---

Thanks

Thanks in advance for any insight.
Happy to provide logs, screenshots, or XML if needed.

Strange, but I haven't biglittle architecture CPU ....

It doesn't look like CPU relate.

On 1/24/2026 at 6:28 PM, Server_home said:

At this point I am considering moving to Home Assistant (Docker

I highly recommend that, it use much less resources, restart docker also much simple and fast.

But switch to docker, HA need start from scratch.

Edited January 25Jan 25 by Vr2Io

Thanks for the input 👍

In the end we decided to move away from the HA OS VM and go with Home Assistant running in Docker on Unraid.

The VM issues didn’t seem CPU-related indeed, and were most likely tied to the virtual disk / VM layer itself. Rather than spending more time troubleshooting XML / img edge cases, we opted for a setup that is simpler, lighter and more transparent on Unraid.

We’re now running:

• Home Assistant Container (Docker)

• External MariaDB

• Dedicated Mosquitto broker

• VLAN-segmented network (LAN / IoT / isolated devices)

This gives us faster restarts, lower resource usage, easier backups and better long-term stability on Unraid.

So far the setup has been working well and fits our use case better than a VM-based HA OS.

Thanks again for the suggestions.

1 minute ago, Server_home said:

We’re now running:

• Home Assistant Container (Docker)

• External MariaDB

• Dedicated Mosquitto broker

• VLAN-segmented network (LAN / IoT / isolated devices)

Exclude external DB, I also setting in similar way and solid running for 2yrs+

Edited January 25Jan 25 by Vr2Io