Hi, I know most of the discussions surrounding virtualizations on M1 have been about Windows or Linux, but I'm wondering if it's possible yet, using something like Parallels, to run a macOS virtual machine on macOS Big Sur running on an M1 Mac.
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Is it possible to run a macOS virtual machine on M1 yet?
- Thread starter ebelinski
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To do so we need some sort of bootloader for ARM that loads macOS in VM, like opencore for x86.
macOS on apple silicon has a protected booting process, I don't think it would be trivial for 3rd-parties to make such bootloader without help from Apple.
macOS on apple silicon has a protected booting process, I don't think it would be trivial for 3rd-parties to make such bootloader without help from Apple.
I'm pretty sure it was stated that it will be possible when Parallels for Apple Silicon arrives, Same with the VMware Fusion versions for Apple Silicon. Certainly, they're all leveraging Apple's Hypervisor framework, so it ought to be doable.
Again, I'm pretty sure that this is baked into Apple's Hypervisor framework as being able to run Mac VMs via said Hypervisor was (I'm pretty sure) stated to still be possible on Apple Silicon, so long as they were the Apple Silicon version of macOS and not an x86 version.
No, I've read the document. Hypervisor framework is a low level api and it does not handle boot loading. Even for the higher level virtualization framework, you still need to bring your own bootloader as the framework only provides a linux boot loader.
I'm not saying it handles boot loading. I'm saying that perhaps Apple Silicon macOS releases know how to boot on it seeing as it's the only sanctioned option Apple is giving hypervisor apps to be able to use to run VMs on Apple Silicon.
It's not like VMware and Parallels made their own bootloaders to boot x86 macOS versions on the Intel releases of Fusion and Desktop, respectively.
An OS kernel cannot boot itself, there need to be "something" to load the kernel into the memory, like the UEFI firmware we are having on current PC.
The best try we can have is to use a modified iPad Pro firmware and see if it will load macOS kernel(technically they are using the same xnu kernel).
Edit: even if it does load the kernel, it's only the first move of booting, and there will be many issues to be resolved to get into the user space.
Said "something" is a virtual machine complete with its own firmware as dictated by the Apple Hypervisor. You're saying there needs to be a virtual computer complete with the correct virtual firmware to initialize the bootloader of macOS. I'm not disagreeing with you there as I know how a computer boots. What I'm saying is that, no different to how a dude got Windows 10 for ARM64 to boot on qemu (leveraging the Apple Hypervisor [the same exact Apple Hypervisor that VMware and Parallels will be forced to leverage in their Apple Silicon releases of Fusion and Desktop, respectively]), macOS for Apple Silicon likely can boot in a similar fashion on a similar setup. Maybe modification is needed, but I doubt it's much, seeing as this is a key feature that they have advertised about this transition.
We are using TianoCore, an open source UEFI firmware to boot Windows, this is not included in Hypervisor framework.
I guess I will just try to do this on Parallels and see what happens lol. I have an existing license I can transfer to my M1 device. I'll report back what happens. I'm just surprised that Parallels or VMWare doesn't yet provide a clear answer to this question.
The Parallels installer hit me with the message "This version of Parallels Desktop is not supported on Apple Silicon Macs." multiple times but it let me proceed. But then in the window to create a VM, I see all the normal options (Windows, Ubuntu, etc) but I don't see the option to install macOS using the recovery partition, so I guess this is where I stop.
Now that Parallels 16 is officially available on M1, has anybody been able to set up a macOS VM on an M1?
