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romantomjak

> a Developer Preview package for systems with an Apple silicon CPU

Ooo, can’t wait to try this out!

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What do people use who run an M1/M2 based Mac but want to run an x86 VM?

Because you can't do this with Virtualbox.

If you really need to, UTM (which uses qemu for x86).

But if you just want to run x86 Windows software, it's much better to run that under a Windows 11 ARM64 VM.

UTM doesn't have vagrant support yet:

https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518

I basically just want to continue using vagrant, ansible, and ubuntu on my M1 -- what's currently the best stack for that? I tried out Parallels, but there don't seem to be any reputable and up-to-date Ubuntu images for it.

Can’t you just use the official Ubuntu installer with Parallels? (ARM version of course)

Vagrant allows you to configure a script that will create several VMs in the configuration you need. I, for example, use it to create a real Kubernetes cluster with 3 masters and several compute workers.

Not sure why people downvoted, but I am also missing Vagrant. I need to configure multiple VMs for various testing, and having Vagrant to spin up a lot of VMs, and run everything I need, that is something I would want to see with vagrant and virtualbox again.

Vagrant + vmware plugin + vmware fusion tech preview. All open source (and free). It does work on my M1 (e.g., I'm able to spin up 4 Ubuntu VMs on my M1 for playing around with Ansible and deployments. Each VM with its own static IP). Now, you either have to trust on one of the Vagrant images for ARM available on Vagrant Cloud, or bake our own using, for instance, Packer.

Thanks, this is great! Do you have any opinion on the trustworthiness of the Bento or Roboxes (generic/) builds?

Bento is good (but they do not have the newest Ubuntu vagrant images for ARM afaik, hence the need to either trust in other not-so-well-known users or bake your own). Can't say about Roboxes.

I rent x86 VPS and using it remotely. x86 VM on macOS basically is unusable. It's doable with qemu emulation, but it's as slow as molasses.

You mean on M1. On x86 it is pretty fast. Basic stuff is usable but try Java on a x86 VM on M1 (the Java program I need has a lot of .so compiled for x86 so no choice)

UTM. It's qemu under the hood and will emulate x86 if you want it to. (Or other architectures, it runs Mac OS 9 under an emulated PowerPC perfectly. Great fun.)

But it's not quick. I would not attempt to run a modern Windows on it, I don't think it would work due to a lack of performance.

For those not familiar with UTM:

https://mac.getutm.app/

"Securely run operating systems on your Mac"

$10 for a GUI.

only if you use Apple's walled garden. did you miss the multiple links to the free download hosted on github?

What a deal! Id gladly pay for a nice GUI that manages things and makes configuration easy. My time is worth way more than $10.

Also, “Purchasing the App Store version directly funds the development of UTM and shows your support.”

> Id gladly pay for a nice GUI that manages things and makes configuration easy.

that GUI which gives you like 10% exposure to all supported qemu and apple virtualization layer features won't make your configuration easy.

> “Purchasing the App Store version directly funds the development of UTM and shows your support.”

I'd prefer to fund to fund projects like qemu itself. Not some feature incomplete GUI sitting on top of qemu.

Is this comment supposed to indicate that’s expensive? A fast food meal to support the development of an intuitive GUI wrapper around a piece of software I may use for hours on end? There’s also a free download on their website.

It's both free and open source (https://github.com/utmapp/UTM). You can pay 10$ to get automatic updates, which IMHO is a very fair price and you are helping support the project.

That's caught my attention

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