Comment by kmeisthax

I'd kill for an Apple-sanctioned way to load Linux VMs on my iPad and have them run at full speed. It's got an M1 in it, the virtualization hardware is there, Apple just doesn't want me using it.

As it currently stands, the options for Linux VMs on an iPad are:

- iSH, a Linux kernel ABI compatible user-mode x86 emulator that uses threaded code (ROP chains) as a substitute for a proper JIT, but doesn't support all x86 applications[0].

- UTM, a port of QEMU that requires JIT (and thus, either an external debugger or a jailbreak) to run a full x86 or ARM OS.

- UTM SE (Slow Edition), which is UTM but using the threaded code technique from iSH, which is not only slower than iSH because it runs both kernel and user mode, but also got banned from TestFlight before they could even make an App Store submission (probably because it can get to a desktop while iSH can't).

All of these suck in different ways.

[0] Notably, rustc gives an illegal instruction error and mysql crashes trying to do unaligned atomics