On: Run a macOS VM on Apple Silicon from a double-click with Vimy

[moondev]

Is it possible to run asahi Linux inside this or any other hypervisor on macos?

[_joel → moondev]

It's designed to make future linux easier to run out of the box on Mac silicon, not really intended to be run as linux in a VM. If you want vms, use UTM https://mac.getutm.app/

[pxc → _joel]

Tart is also very cool. It's not F/OSS but it is source-available and its license is liberal about non-commercial and small-scale commercial use:

https://github.com/cirruslabs/tart

The very cool thing about Tart is how it uses OCI for OS images, so you can use your existing image registry infrastructure to host and pull down OS images.

Cilicon is a compatible F/OSS clone that currently only supports a subset of that functionality: https://github.com/traderepublic/Cilicon

These are more CI-oriented but I like how that makes it easy to manage state with them.

If you're focused on Linux VMs and maybe not on GUI stuff (although I'm sure you can make that work), Lima seems to be the go-to in the user 'community', as it were: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

If you use ARM guests on Apple Silicon, you should get good perf just like with stuff in the OP. (Like UTM, Lima is based on QEMU.)

[_joel → pxc]

Yes, played with Tart, forgot about it actually until you mentioned it again and not heard of the F/OSS one, so thanks for that :)

[chaxor → _joel]

You mean qemu.

Utm is qemu, but they just removed the open source part. So it's just definitely worse.

[_joel → chaxor]

You can use UTM with Apple's Virtualisation backend too, have been for a while and works fine for me https://docs.getutm.app/settings-apple/settings-apple/

[robin_reala → chaxor]

UTM is open source too though: https://github.com/utmapp/UTM#license

[vbezhenar → moondev]

Asahi linux made for apple hardware. For virtual hardware you can run almost any popular distro like Ubuntu, Fedora.

[moondev → vbezhenar]

I'm aware, but considering this provides virtual apple hardware to run macos inside the vm, I'm curious if this can also be used to install/run asahi inside the vm.

My motivation here is exploring asahi on my MacBook inside a vm without needing to install it on the metal and modify partitions on the disk

[pxc → moondev]

I think you can still take advantage of paravirtualization without running an OS built for Apple Silicon specifically. You can emulate peripherals and the motherboard and stuff without emulating the CPU, so you would probably do better just to run the regular ARM variant of whatever distro.

Both Arch and Fedora, which some releases of Asahi are based on, have regular, shmegular ARM variants.