Parallels Desktop for Apple Silicon Mac | Hacker News Reader

Parallels Desktop for Apple Silicon Mac

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32 pointsaleksi12 comments

> Parallels is also amazed by the news from Microsoft about adding support of x64 applications in Windows on ARM.

It's strange that they mention this but don't say whether it will be possible to run Windows in Parallels on Apple silicon. From everything I've read so far, it seems it's not currently possible to purchase a version of Windows for ARM because Microsoft licenses it only to OEMs.

Where I work they’re stockpiling Intel based Macs before inventory from their VAR runs out. Machines specifically for engineering teams as they use some tools which will only work on Intel. Virtualization tools is one of the needs and the M1 compatibility is not there yet like this post from Parallels mentions.

I remember the last transition from PowerPC to Intel. At that time it was more consumer coded applications that had the wait and see approach or delays. Now that Apple is a mainstream tool used for developer environments, this transition might be more painful as startups rely on OSS that may not be ready for M1.

Unfortunately with no native x86 support, true x86 virtualization goes away.

True virtualization will be for ARM (such as Linux or macOS, maybe embedded Win10 for ARM) VMs only. x86 Windows VMs will not work with native ARM virtualization, and x86 apps will run slowly if at all under emulation in ARM Win10.

However, Parallels (and VMware etc.) could potentially leverage Rosetta 2 to run x86 VMs in emulation on ARM, at greatly reduced speed compared to native x86 virtualization on intel Macs.

Boot Camp for x86 Windows is dead on these machines as well.

Is there confirmation yet whether the new ARM chips will even have any virtualisation?

Yes, it was announced that they do have virtualization.

IIRC at WWDC Apple demonstrated Parallels on ARM running an ARM Linux VM.

Rosetta 2 explicitly lists virtualization as unsupported.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou...

Perhaps you are thinking that I was suggesting that you could simply run Parallels directly under Rosetta 2. I was not.

I will elaborate in a bit more detail:

Parallels could potentially leverage Rosetta 2 (or another emulator, such as Qemu) to emulate x86 code, not to virtualize it, to enable the execution of x86 VM images on ARM.

VMware is perhaps an even better candidate, considering that VMware originally used x86-to-x86 binary translation to support virtualization without VT-x hardware support. Note that Rosetta 2 supports dynamically generated x86 code, such as JIT code generated by JavaScript runtimes in web browsers. I believe execution of x86 plugin code also works.

Note also that Qemu can already boot both native and non-native VM images via emulation - I've used it frequently. It's much slower than virtualization, but it's extremely useful.

I have to wonder how well this will work. I haven't heard anything about in-CPU virtualization tech like in the Intel CPUs.

Here's hoping it works well, because last I checked Microsoft hasn't yet achieved perfect parity between Mac/Windows office apps (and may not be aiming for it).

Well, ARMv8 has virtualization extensions in the architecture, at least in theory: https://developer.arm.com/architectures/learn-the-architectu...

virtualization does not help, you need an emulator to run x86/x64 vms.

That's not what we're talking about. Parallels runs ARM VMs on ARM macOS using hardware virtualization.

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