I recently got myself a M1 Mac and I want to run Linux on it. By reading the docker M1 tech preview release (https://www.docker.com/blog/download-and-try-the-tech-previe...), I was made aware of the existence of Virtualization.framework on recent macOS releases.
Virtualization.framework provides 99% of the building blocks for running a Linux VM on a Mac, but there’s no off-the-shelf CLI for running a VM.
Inspired by https://github.com/evansm7/vftool, I wrote another CLI (vmcli) with some more features (better termios handling / escape sequence detection) in Swift, and build a script (vmctl) to daemon-ize vmcli and help manage VMs. I also made a script for provisioning a Ubuntu VM, so you can run a Ubuntu VM from scratch in minutes.
I needed to add a persistent network configuration (which I didn't really figure out -- I was okay with starting an interface manually. I also had to re-generate the SSH host keys for some reason.
In order to do these, I loaded the image in initramfs (basically started the VM w/o specifying root=/dev/vda as the command line argument). Then I mounted /dev/vda and chroot'd to it. Then I could change the root password to something that I knew, and setup the keys / config.
So, instead of tweaking the setup script, I ended up making the changes manually, but it should be scriptable.
I also was able to use the Ubuntu kernel/initrd to load a Debian 10 image as well. The default Debian 10 cloud image doesn't include the necessary kernel modules (virtio_console might be the only one necessary to add).
I've spent a few days testing out this and the linked vftool (https://github.com/evansm7/vftool) to try to get a Debian VM. It's not an easy thing, but it did eventually work. I ended up corrupting the disk image though, so that wasn't fun.
In order to do this on my Mac w/o needing a Linux machine, I installed ext4fuse so that I could mount raw disk images and mount partitions. I followed instructions from this GH issue, which was a great help.
Virtualization.framework provides 99% of the building blocks for running a Linux VM on a Mac, but there’s no off-the-shelf CLI for running a VM.
Inspired by https://github.com/evansm7/vftool, I wrote another CLI (vmcli) with some more features (better termios handling / escape sequence detection) in Swift, and build a script (vmctl) to daemon-ize vmcli and help manage VMs. I also made a script for provisioning a Ubuntu VM, so you can run a Ubuntu VM from scratch in minutes.