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Comment by oq_pmg | Hacker News Reader

Anyone cares to share how M1s performs with virtualization tasks? Say Windows desktop or Linux cli?

Note that while people here are gushing over performance, it's worth mentioning that you need to run ARM64 virtualized OSes (both Windows and Linux) for it to work.

Getting Intel x64/x86 VMs to work is... fun and they don't perform nearly as well as you'd expect from the gushing praise.

So double check if your virtualization use-case actually is fine with running ARM guests.

Docker runs a linux VM and it destroys intel macbooks. I hardly notice it running on the M1. Flawless experience with minimal power drain.

A coworker of mine is seeing their M1 performing about 2-4x slower than my Intel MacBook Pro where Docker is invoked. So YMMV

That sounds like they’re running x86 containers. I use Podman amd it’s very fast with ARM but notably slower when emulating x86 and there’s at least one case where this hit a JVM race condition in some old vendor code which still uses JDK8.

I'm able to use arm containers for my work and it doesn't seem any slower than what I'd expect from native performance on my M1.

Ditto: slowness is my cue to rebuild the container for both architectures

I'm using vmware fusion to run ubuntu vms for my daily work. The virtualized 20.04 aarch64 is on par with my x64 desktop (5900x from amd). Surprisingly in both, ST and MT loads. The laptop never runs out of juice at the end of the day when I'm on battery. Also there's no perf. penalty for disconnecting the charger.

Pretty good but note the M1 chip does not support nested virtualization. So you can run Windows/ARM but you can't run Docker, VMWARE or VirtualBox inside that.

Flawlessly.

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