Thursday, November 14, 2024

macbook pro – Does VirtualBox run on Apple Silicon?

One issue you have is that VirtualBox does not run on non Intel architectures.

From https://www.virtualbox.org/

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product

To run a virtual machine on Apple Silicon currently
Parallels, UTM and Docker support Linux ARM VMs, In Ventura Apple provides another API to run vitualisation for Linux, an example of this is VirtualBuddy.

Parallels and UTM also support other OSs that run on ARM including Windows, Parallels 17 can run macOS Monterey. VirtualBuddy can run macOS Ventura.

VMware has now (Sept 2021) announced a preview version for ARM that does not officially support Windows or macOS. And on July 28th 2022 VMWare released a tech preview that says it supports Windows 11 and says they are looking into support for macOS.

VirtualBox does seem now Oct 2022 to be working on a macOS ARM version but as Ars Technica says

I can report that the VirtualBox client informs you, extensively and consistently, about the non-production nature of your client. The changelog notes that it’s an “unsupported work in progress” that is “known to have very modest performance.” A “Beta Warning” shows up in the (new and unified) message center, and in the upper-right corner, a “BETA” warning on the window frame is stacked on top of a construction-style “Dev Preview” warning sign.

The other thing to note is that if the VM you want to run is an Intel one then you need an emulator like Qemu.
You probably can’t just load an Intel VM to run natively as ARM so have to rebuild the VM from an ARM based install.

Docker can run Intel Linux VMs on Apple Silicon from their blog as can UTM, both use QEMU as a part of implementing this.

As UTM includes QEMU UTM can run Intel Windows or Intel macOS or PPC classic macos (and possibly PPC OSX )

macOS itself provides an API used by Virtual Buddy and examples from Eclecticlight to allow users to write VMs that can run Linux command line programs or macOS. This includes a beta API to allow Intel Linux programs to run under Rosetta and beta API to allow Linux graphical programs.

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