Linux kernel can boot mostly on its own by probing the hardware and using the linked-in drivers. The NT kernel requires an environment such as UEFI air legacy BIOS and relies on it, for example, to load additional drivers. It also expects to be loaded in a certain manner by the pre-loader (winload.efi) while Linux has less strict requirements.

This is why QEMU can provide built in support for booting Linux - it’s much simpler to implement. For Windows you need to prepare a disk image with the file system and a UEFI environment such as OVMF. The Windows kernel uses registry (BCD - Boot configuration data) for configuration instead of command line arguments so it’s trickier to implement.

Linux kernel can boot mostly on its own by probing the hardware and using the linked-in drivers. The NT kernel requires an environment such as UEFI or legacy BIOS and relies on it, for example, to load additional drivers. It also expects to be loaded in a certain manner by the pre-loader (winload.efi) while Linux has less strict requirements.

This is why QEMU can provide built in support for booting Linux - it’s much simpler to implement. For Windows you need to prepare a disk image with the file system and a UEFI environment such as OVMF. The Windows kernel uses registry (BCD - Boot configuration data) for configuration instead of command line arguments so it’s trickier to implement.