Hacker News Reader

Comment by garblegarble | Hacker News Reader

Would you elaborate what you mean by saying Linux on an M-series chip isn't straightforward? That's not been my experience, I (and lots of other devs) use it every day, Apple supports Linux via [0], and provides the ability to use Rosetta 2 within VMs to run legacy x86 binaries?

0: https://github.com/apple/container

View on HN

Clearly I'm not as knowledgable about this as I thought I was. I already have a Ubuntu x86 VM running on an Intel Mac (inside VirtualBox). Same with Windows 11. Can this tool allow me to run both VMs in an Apple Silicon device in a performant way? Last I checked VirtualBox on Apple Silicon only permits the running of ARM64 guests.

While I have a preference for VirtualBox I'd say I'm hypervisor agnostic. Really any way I can get this to work would be super intriguing to me.

Run ARM64 Linux and install Rosetta inside it. Even on the MacBook Neo it'll be faster than your 2020 Intel Mac.

> Can this tool allow me to run both VMs in an Apple Silicon device in a performant way?

I use VMWare Fusion on an M1 Air to run ARM Windows. Windows is then able to run Windows x86-64 executables I believe through it's own Rosetta 2 like implementation. The main limitation is that you cannot use x86-64 drivers.

Similarly, ARM Linux VMs can use Rosetta 2 to run x86-64 binaries with excellent performance. For that I mostly use Rancher or podman which setup the Linux VM automatically and then use it to run Linux ARM containers. I don't recall if I've tried to run x86-64 Linux binaries inside an Linux ARM container. It might be a little trickier to get Rosetta 2 to work. It's been a long time since I tried to run a Linux x86-64 container.

Possible catch: Rosetta 2 goes away next year in macOS 27.

I don’t know what the story for VMs is. I’d really like to know as it affects me.

Sure you can go QEMU, but there’s a real performance hit there.

Not until macOS 28., but you're right, it's frustratingly unclear whether the initial deprecation is limited to macOS apps or whether it will also stop working for VMs.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

Oh I have another year? Phew.

It would be pretty difficult for Apple to disable Rosetta for VMs.

How so?

It never existed.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

It doesn’t require anything from the host

The Apple documentation for using the Virtualization framework with ARM Linux VMs to run x86_64 binaries requires Rosetta to be installed:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

So you must be talking about something else, perhaps ARM Windows VMs which use their own technology for running x86 binaries[^1].

In any case, please elaborate instead of being so vague. Thanks.

[^1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...

You can just splat whatever support files it needs into the VM there isn't anything special about them. In fact you can copy them onto a different (non-Mac) device and use them there too

This can be avoided by not upgrading to MacOS 28 right? I'm new to Mac's and the Apple release schedule so I'm not sure how mandatory the annual updates are.

Does Apple Silicon support VMs within VMs?

What if you run MacOS 27 in a VM, and then run the x86-hosting VM inside that?

Pay Parallels for their GPU acceleration that makes Arm windows on apple silicon usable.

> Last I checked VirtualBox on Apple Silicon only permits the running of ARM64 guests.

I used to use VirtualBox a lot back in the day. I tried it recently on my Mac; it's become pretty bloated over the years.

On the other hand, this GUI for Quem is pretty nice [1].

[1]: https://mac.getutm.app

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

This is a super easy way to run linux VMs on Apple Silicon. It can also act as a backend for docker.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com