Unsupported architecture Apple Silicon M1

[miklaine]

Would it be possible to add such support?

[steven-michaud]

I don't know whether or not it will be possible, but I definitely will look into it. And not just for the M1 chip.

However, I won't start until Apple has made available the source code for the macOS 11 xnu kernel. And I'm inclined to wait to buy an Apple Silicon machine until a better chip than the M1 is available -- until the machines support more than 16GB of RAM.

[steven-michaud]

Apple has recently released source code for the macOS 11.0.1 xnu kernel. But release versions of VMWare Fusion and Parallels don't yet support Apple Silicon hosts and guests. I'm going to wait until at least one of these is available, in a release version, with comprehensive support for Apple Silicon. Adding Apple Silicon support to HookCase, or even just investigating if it's possible to add support, will trigger hundreds of kernel panics in my testing environment. I don't feel comfortable doing this on actual hardware.

[miklaine]

I understand that. Hopefully, Parallels and/or VMWare will release working solutions sooner than later :)

[panjiancai]

I am looking forward to supporting M1 chips.

[steven-michaud]

And I'm waiting for VMware or Parallels to release software that can virtualize some version of macOS on Apple Silicon hardware. As best I can tell, this isn't going to happen soon. Parallels has a beta that can do this in a very limited fashion. VMware doesn't have anything at all. Neither company talks about their future plans, beyond vaguely promising it at some future date.

Even when one or more of these becomes available, I'll have at least several months of very difficult work, without any guarantee that it will be successful.

Given what I know now (which admittedly isn't much), I'd say that a version of HookCase that supports Apple Silicon hardware is at least a year away.

[sferrini]

Hey @steven-michaud, fyi there are two open-source projects on GitHub that use the Virtualization.framework APIs to virtualize macOS on Apple Silicon. One of them (VirtualApple) even exposes a GDB stub port where one can attach lldb and perform kernel debugging.

• https://github.com/KhaosT/MacVM.git
• https://github.com/saagarjha/VirtualApple

I've personally tried both of them, and I was able to successfully boot an Apple Silicon VM.

[steven-michaud]

Thanks, @sferrini, for pointing these out to me. I'll play around with them later, when I have more time.

Neither of them has any documentation, so it's hard to know whether or not they'll meet my needs. These are, briefly: The VMs they create must 1) allow me to run Apple's installer for (say) macOS Monterey (for Apple Silicon) inside them, then 2) on reboot allow me to run macOS Monterey itself (the copy I've just installed). They must also 3) have full access (from inside the VM) to the host machine's hardware -- to things like a dedicated hard disk partition and to everything needed for networking (something like VMware's "bridged networking"). It'd also be nice to 4) be able to copy and paste between the VM and the host machine, but that's not strictly necessary.

I'd like to learn more about Apple's Virtualization framework. I notice Apple has its own documentation. But, given past experience with Apple's docs, this probably isn't enough by itself to allow me to do my own virtualization. It'd probably help to have the example code from these projects.

In any case, learning Apple's Virtualization framework will almost certainly be very time consuming. Add that to the time I already expect to be spending adding support for Apple Silicon to HookCase :-)

[cakarlen]

Has there been any movement on this issue?

[steven-michaud]

No. VMware and Parallels still don't have releases that support macOS clients on Apple Silicon hardware.

If I had to guess, I'd say this is probably because Apple's Virtualization framework is still inadequate for full-featured macOS clients on Apple Silicon hardware. With luck, Apple may provide better support in the next version of macOS ... or maybe they won't. Only time will tell.

[steven-michaud]

Here's a link to a comment by a VMware employee that sheds some light on the problem of supporting macOS clients on Apple Silicon hardware. Note that it's a bit old (11-30-2021). If I find more interesting links I'll post them here.

https://communities.vmware.com/t5/Fusion-for-Apple-Silicon-Tech/Can-you-share-any-info-about-macOS-guest-support/m-p/2880768#M400

[cakarlen]

Would this utility help create VMs on M1? https://github.com/saagarjha/VirtualApple

[steven-michaud]

It might, I suppose. But like the two projects mentioned above, it has no documentation whatsoever.

When I use unknown software, I like to have some idea of what it does before I use it. Especially if it purports to do something as complex as creating virtual machines. Quite frankly, I'm not going to play with these projects until I understand them much better. Practically speaking, the only way for me to do that is to read Apple's Virtualization framework docs and try to write my own virtualization software, using code from these projects as sample code.

As I mentioned above, I now strongly suspect that Apple's Virtualization framework is inadequate for full-featured macOS clients on Apple Silicon hardware. So I'm not going to start this work until the next major release of macOS, and until Apple has had time to rewrite its docs to reflect any changes it might make to Apple's resources for virtualization on Apple Silicon hardware. I'll also wait as long as I can for VMware and Parallels to do this work for me. No sense in doing more than I really need to.

[sferrini]

@steven-michaud if you have some time, you could have a look at the UTM project, they added support for macOS guests in v3.0.0 (they are at v3.1.5 now) using Apple's Virtualization.framework as a backend.

Creating ARM64e macOS VMs with UTM is extremely easy and intuitive, they also integrated the IPSW downloading feature in their UI.

Give it a try, and let me know if you have any issues or questions.
I'm not a maintainer but I've been using this tool successfully in the past few months.

You can download latest installer from here: https://mac.getutm.app/ (or directly from GitHub)

[steven-michaud]

Thanks, @sferrini. I looked briefly at the UTM project, and it does seem promising. I expect, though, that it's different from VMware Fusion and Parallels in (at least) two important ways:

1. VMware Fusion and Parallels do virtualization. But UTM seems to do virtualization on top of emulation (provided via QEMU). This is potentially much more powerful. For example, in principle you'd be able to run a macOS ARM64E client on X86_64 hardware, or in a Windows or Linux host. But it'd be much more resource intensive. And you'd have to emulate every piece of hardware the client needs -- not just pass through access to it (as Fusion and Parallels seem to do).

2. As I understand it, VMware and Parallels work closely with Apple to make their macOS client environments resemble "genuine" Apple hardware as much as possible. They make this easier by forcing their macOS hosts to run on Apple hardware. But I expect UTM's maintainers work entirely independently from Apple (as I do). So running macOS in their virtualized hardware environment is probably a bit like running macOS on a Hackintosh.

At some point I'll try out UTM. I don't expect it to be a straight-up replacement for something that VMware or Parallels might provide in the future. But it may be good enough for me to start work there on porting HookCase to Apple Silicon.

It will be quite a while before I start this work. I'd still much prefer to wait for Apple Silicon macOS clients from VMware or Parallels. But I won't wait forever.