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Comment by garblegarble

15 hours ago

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

16 comments

garblegarble

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stuxnet79  14 hours ago

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.

  • js2  14 hours ago

    > 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.

    • MBCook  13 hours ago

      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.

      9 replies →

  • alwillis  14 hours ago

    > 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

  • argsnd  14 hours ago

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