Virtualisation on Apple Silicon Macs is different | Hacker News Reader

Virtualisation on Apple Silicon Macs is different

eclecticlight.co

125 pointszdw34 comments

TFA does not contain the word "copy", but copy-paste (shared clipboard) support stands out strongly to me as being "different" in Apple Silicon virtualization at this time.

TFA does mention the word "clipboard", but the containing sentence, while perhaps technically correct, seems a bit misleading, as follows: "As implemented in macOS (both as guest and host), there are also extensions to support keyboard and pointing devices, a shared clipboard, and high-performance graphics with Metal and GPU support." As I understand it, even if those extensions "exist", what good are they if they are not adopted?:

- If you virtualize macOS within macOS on Apple Silicon using UTM, you cannot copy paste between systems reliably (bidirectional shared clipboard is very, very fragile; "can" work a little but is essentially fully broken/unreliable).

- If you virtualize macOS within macOS on Apple Silicon using Parallels (often considered a best-choice solution), you cannot copy paste between systems at all (bidirectional shared clipboard is an explicit non-feature at this time).

Thus, if you want bidirectional clipboard, on a macOS host, you'll have to run a *nix (seems to work) or maybe Win (I haven't tried) guest OS.

I would have tried VMWare Fusion (free for personal use), but after jumping through all the signup and download navigation hoops, I couldn't even get the download link to un-gray itself out for me. Is bidirectional macOS to macOS clipboard implemented there? IDK and I cannot tell.

I use VMWare Fusion, (version 13.6.4 because 25H2 has a bad scrolling bug that makes it unusable for me) and it does implement bi-directional copy/paste, and you can also drag files in and out of the VM (there's a few tricks required to make it work sometimes) but I've only tested this for Windows 10 and Linux as a guest, not macOS as a guest.

Re: Downloading, I have the same issue. What I do is note the note the SHA2 for the file on the official download site, then find a copy somewhere else on the internet [0], and verify the SHA2 of that file matches the one on the Broadcom web site.

Fusion feels very much like it's on life support.

0. For example, https://www.techspot.com/downloads/2755-vmware-fusion-mac.ht...

Fusion has no graphics support. Parallels is way better if you need any GPU, which you do, since everything uses that these days.

The writing was on the wall with Fusion when they made it free. It's unfortunate.

Not the same thing, but...

I used to run a macos vm under proxmox, and I just used screen sharing to remote in from my apple desktop. Copy/paste of even complicated stuff works fine between the apple desktop and the vm desktop. Also drag and drop files, etc

I have copy paste working bi directional on Parallels

Thanks for pointing it out. I will have to try again.

What a lovely technical article for those of us that haven't followed it, thanks! I was thinking this might be about how Parallels does not have copy-and-paste for M1-on-M1 macOS-on-macOS virtualization, which is definitely "thinking different" compared to all other desktop virtualization that I have encountered.

TLDR: macOS virtualization is as fast as native due to hypervisor support, with free but limited driver support thanks to virtio. MacOS guests are limited to 2 at a time, and cannot use iCloud services or log in to the App Store.

Also FYI:

- launch times are fast enough for serverless

- you can restore snapshots for macOS guests but not for Linux

- Apple's open-source container support is built on Virtualization, making it a much more secure option than Docker

What's needs investigating is access to the secure enclave. You can login with an apple ID and use enclave API's; it's not clear if this is emulated or handled using the host enclave with a different scope - i.e., if this presents any security issues. To be conservative, one might avoid logging in using an Apple ID with sensitive information in an automated/CI context.

For me the key point was how the frog is slowly being boiled and macOS is being converted slowly to ios / iPadOS with increasing restrictions. Case in point, now system developers cannot build and sell custom virtualisation solutions for Macs:

> For vendors like VMware and Parallels ... there’s no scope for either of them to engineer better or faster graphics support, as that’s determined by features provided in both guest and host operating systems, via Virtio or an equivalent. That puts Apple in charge of what hardware and features are supported by virtualisation on Apple silicon.

Slowly boiled? Apple has their frog in a nuclear reactor core at this point, and it still hasn't jumped out.

So if I wanted to run Windows ARM on an Apple Silicon Mac, what's the best option(s) that make full use of the hypervisor? I'm aware of UTM [0] but the second paragraph of the article makes it seem like UTM is a software emulator (that doesn't take advantage of the hypervisor?)

0. https://mac.getutm.app

Running Windows under UTM on macOS was (and might still be) the fastest way to run Windows on ARM.

UTM does both. hypervisor for ARM, qemu for other archs

I need to run a few utilities that only work on Windows and those work fine on Windows for ARM under UTM. These utilities are built for Intel but run fine - Windows for ARM translates the code on the fly. It has a translation layer called "Prism."

Parallels and VMware still do implement their own graphics virtualisation (among other things) for Windows and Linux guests on Apple silicon, and in my experience Parallels still works better than the alternatives for Windows.

UTM can do both depending on how you configure it.

No mention of http://tart.run? I use parallels for windows and Ubuntu, but for macOS, tart has been great!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com