Limitations of ARM Virtual Machines (mostly a development perspective)

[Internaut]

So, I've had an interesting couple of weeks playing with virtualisation, setting up a couple of Linux VMs and testing. Some of my findings were a little surprising:

• It seems Google never bothered to port Chrome to ARM Linux (but couldn't support ARM Mac fast enough - I'm guessing many here will see no Chrome as an upside :-/ )
• Development tools: It seems outfits like Eclipse and JetBrains haven't ported their IDEs for ARM (Edit) Linux
• But Visual Studio Code is up and running (albeit not in the Ubuntu app store - had to install from a deb file)
• Surprisingly, Geckodriver is simply available via sudo apt get, so I'm all set up to get my Web Automation Framework up and running (one point of the project is a big code tidy and make it platform/browser agnostic)
• And I was able to simply clone my Automation/Gherkin/Maven demo from GitHub and get it up and running very quickly
• The ARM port of a Subversion tool I use (kdesvn) proved buggy and spammed me with hundreds of certificate errors, but that has an upside (learning svn command line moved to the top of my list and I'm glad I did)
• Android development is probably a none starter - Android Studio hasn't been ported (but strangely, it seems things like Dart SDK and Flutter are ported).

Overall, Ubuntu is more nippy than VirtualBox hosted Ubuntu on the corporate, quad core i7 Dell, and very similar (slightly faster, I think) to Hyper-V hosted Ubuntu on my dual core (i7) 2015 Thinkpad Carbon (and Hyper-V is Type 1, so very close to the metal).

But what about Windows. Well, it works and I've started setting up a dev environment - Visual Studio Code is there but I've not checked out things like git and maven in that environment. Nor do I know if Subversion tools are available. If using an 8GB model, like me, I'd suggest closing a few things. Like many M1 users, it seems I have Activity Monitor permanently on so happily watched memory pressure switch up to Insane when Windows did a large update (closing Edge in MacOS got things a bit more stable). For serious use, I suspect Windows is not advisable for 8GB M1 Macs....

I think Apple's move to ARM based silicon is going to speed up the porting of missing bits to both ARM Linux and ARM Windows. And on Linux I'm mostly working around problems as I'm finding (so little in the way of showstoppers).

 

[Significant1]

• Development tools: It seems outfits like Eclipse and JetBrains haven't ported their IDEs for ARM

Hmmm, all the JetBrains I try, have a Apple Silicon download. Don't know about Android Studio, but it must be up to google, since IntelliJ IDEA also have a Apple Silicon version.

edit: There is a beta version with preliminary support for Apple Silicon. https://androidstudio.googleblog.com/2021/04/android-studio-arctic-fox-canary-15.html

 

[Internaut]

Hmmm, all the JetBrains I try, have a Apple Silicon download. Don't know about Android Studio, but it must be up to google, since IntelliJ IDEA also have a Apple Silicon version.

edit: There is a beta version with preliminary support for Apple Silicon. https://androidstudio.googleblog.com/2021/04/android-studio-arctic-fox-canary-15.html

Oh MacOS on Apple Silicon is far better supported than either Windows or Linux on ARM (both of which have been around a lot longer), largely thanks to Rosetta. IntelliJ was one of the first things I tried on the M1 MBA.

 

[haralds]

So, I've had an interesting couple of weeks playing with virtualisation, setting up a couple of Linux VMs and testing. Some of my findings were a little surprising:

• It seems Google never bothered to port Chrome to ARM Linux (but couldn't support ARM Mac fast enough - I'm guessing many here will see no Chrome as an upside :-/ )
• Development tools: It seems outfits like Eclipse and JetBrains haven't ported their IDEs for ARM (Edit) Linux
• But Visual Studio Code is up and running (albeit not in the Ubuntu app store - had to install from a deb file)
• Surprisingly, Geckodriver is simply available via sudo apt get, so I'm all set up to get my Web Automation Framework up and running (one point of the project is a big code tidy and make it platform/browser agnostic)
• And I was able to simply clone my Automation/Gherkin/Maven demo from GitHub and get it up and running very quickly
• The ARM port of a Subversion tool I use (kdesvn) proved buggy and spammed me with hundreds of certificate errors, but that has an upside (learning svn command line moved to the top of my list and I'm glad I did)
• Android development is probably a none starter - Android Studio hasn't been ported (but strangely, it seems things like Dart SDK and Flutter are ported).

Overall, Ubuntu is more nippy than VirtualBox hosted Ubuntu on the corporate, quad core i7 Dell, and very similar (slightly faster, I think) to Hyper-V hosted Ubuntu on my dual core (i7) 2015 Thinkpad Carbon (and Hyper-V is Type 1, so very close to the metal).

But what about Windows. Well, it works and I've started setting up a dev environment - Visual Studio Code is there but I've not checked out things like git and maven in that environment. Nor do I know if Subversion tools are available. If using an 8GB model, like me, I'd suggest closing a few things. Like many M1 users, it seems I have Activity Monitor permanently on so happily watched memory pressure switch up to Insane when Windows did a large update (closing Edge in MacOS got things a bit more stable). For serious use, I suspect Windows is not advisable for 8GB M1 Macs....

I think Apple's move to ARM based silicon is going to speed up the porting of missing bits to both ARM Linux and ARM Windows. And on Linux I'm mostly working around problems as I'm finding (so little in the way of showstoppers).

I am using Parallels Desktop after playing with Qemu etc.
Regarding Windows: VS Studio and 3rd party tools I tested work. There are some minor behavioral differences, but they might be caused by me using VS2017 before and this is VS2019. All the older SDKs are available. Execution path did not find some DLL during debug, I ended up just adding them to the system path. Some added SDK header paths also had to be made explicit in the project.
I used TortoiseSVN for the command line version. Explorer integration does not work, since it is not ARM.
I also used Cygwin. But I just installed WSL with Ubuntu. You have to force the mode to version 1 and disable WSL2. There is no layered HyperVisor. Once installed I was able to install subversion using sudo apt-get. I have to take another look at how to add wsl Ubuntu paths to the standard cmd path.
After installing Ubuntu I removed Cygwin.

 

[leman]

It's quite interesting, right? ARM Linux has been around for years, but major GUI tools still don't work on it as it was either used as an niche deployment platform or as a barebones embedded/hobbyist device OS.

 

[Earl Urley]

Fusion on Apple Silicon: Progress Update

It’s been a few months since our informal announcement via Twitter back in November where we committed to delivering VMware VMs on Apple silicon devices, so we wanted to take this opportunity to share a bit about how our progress with our little project to bring Fusion to life on Apple silicon...

blogs.vmware.com

VMWare just came right out and said it- they don't think they'll make money on x86 emulation on the M1 relative to the amount of effort they're going to have to put into it to get it to work.

They also cite the built-in x86 emulation in Windows ARM and the existence of existing emulation platforms such as QEMU as mitigating factors.. they're going to concentrate on providing a product that will do Linux ARM VMs.

 

[Gnattu]

You can use open-source chromium instead of the closed source google chrome, which is available for ARM. Please be aware that Google recently removed google account access for the open-sourced version(and limiting that to the closed source version). If you want history syncing use your google account then you will not be able to do it anymore.

 

[Gnattu]

major GUI tools still don't work

Can't agree with that. Only "niche" GUI tools don't work. Linux on ARM has been there for years with most major open-source software been native and it has a much better situation than Windows on ARM which heavily rely on user-space emulation to be useful.

 

[leman]

Can't agree with that. Only "niche" GUI tools don't work. Linux on ARM has been there for years with most major open-source software been native and it has a much better situation than Windows on ARM which heavily rely on user-space emulation to be useful.

It was a comment on OP’s report. Eclipse or Android Studio are hardly niche tools. But I digress. It is true that my statement probably seems stronger than I have intended.