this is an interesting fork: https://github.com/brucehoult/SimpleVM
this one allows to use an extra disk image!
this one allows to use an extra disk image!
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Ubuntu Linux virtualized on M1 (success!)
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I think the idea of his project is to run completely from the command line. Maybe useful if you want to spin up and down a bunch of these VMs? Just my theory, but I was a little confused as well.
Some skilled developer should seriously just build a “Parallels light” pretty app with easy virtual drive creation. Open source is great, but I think a lot of people would be more than happy to pay $5 or $10 for something like this. More if it had some rudimentary GPU support; some kind of OpenGL passthrough virtual GPU?
Linux on Mac is a somewhat niche audience; but for the next few months while we wait for gcc and then homebrew to be ported, I think it would be a popular app.
there once was such an app, back when Apple first introduced their own hypervisor. sadly, they (Veertu) stopped development:
Easy virtual drive creation, file browser, etc... can be added to the current open source project easily.
But a graphical interface is not trivial. Apple isn't exposing too much in their virtualization framework. I don't see virtualization for GPU. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Edit: looks like if you need a GPU, it's even lower level, and a lot more work:
Hypervisor | Apple Developer Documentation
Build virtualization solutions on top of a lightweight hypervisor, without third-party kernel extensions.
I'll just leave this to Parallels or VMWare. They probably already have some old code base that can be tweaked to achieve this. The virtualization framework that Apple exposes currently only seems to work with Linux and only supports a CLI, ran through the serial port.
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Parallels is already in the Mac App Store using hypervisor.framework. Zero chance it won’t be updated for arm if it isn’t already.
their non-MAS version has also had the option for using apples hypervisor for a little while now, presumably the non-mas arm version will only have that option.
Similar problem here. I created a disk image by doing:
Disk Utility -> File -> New Image -> Blank Image -> Size: 20gb, Format: FAT, Partition: no partition map
Using ubuntu-20.04.1-live-server-arm64.iso I was able to get quite a ways into the installation, and thought it maybe completed. But it rebooted back into the installer.
I can then go to the help menu and access a shell. I see that my 20GB volume is mounted and there are a lot of files there, but unsure why I cannot boot off of it. I was able to pull up an error log from the help menu that seems to have a detailed installation log...but it is HUGE. Not sure where the failure point is.
Fascinating news, I did not expect this to come so soon and in this fashion.
Makes me wish I had two things: an M1 and some time.
Makes me wish I had two things: an M1 and some time.
It shows up in the App Store on my Intel Mac running Big Sur but does not show up in the App Store of my M1 Mac.
I pay for an annual license for Parallels on one of my Macs, but it would be nice if there was a less costly solution to just run CLI linux until gcc and homebrew are finished.
So this is just running the Ubuntu Live image directly from the .iso with a RAM-based volatile file system?
I think we need gcc and homebrew ported to the M1 before this can work. I believe the ETA is a few months.
No. GCC is different from Apple's compiler, which is LLVM. GCC is the standard for GNU software, and most Linux applications; so GCC is needed to support the wide variety of software homebrew has allowed us to install on macOS. So we are all hoping for GCC to come to Mx Macs soon.
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Could an x64 version of GCC run under Rosetta and cross-compile to arm64?No. GCC is different from Apple's compiler, which is LLVM. GCC is the standard for GNU software, and most Linux applications; so GCC is needed to support the wide variety of software homebrew has allowed us to install on macOS. So we are all hoping for GCC to come to Mx Macs soon.
there's a ton of pre-built aarch64 images available on the ubuntu download server. maybe one of these will work right away...
images:
vmlinuz & initrd:
images:
vmlinuz & initrd:
No. GCC is different from Apple's compiler, which is LLVM. GCC is the standard for GNU software, and most Linux applications; so GCC is needed to support the wide variety of software homebrew has allowed us to install on macOS. So we are all hoping for GCC to come to Mx Macs soon.
I know what GCC is. But the "equivalent" of GCC for Apple's "own" build toolchain is not LLVM, it's clang.
They *used* to ship actual GNU gcc. Now they ship a GCC binary that is essentially clang.
I would be very surprised if xquartz won't compile with clang. I would also not be surprised if the brew "maintainers" insist on using GNU gcc, because every other decision they make is ass-backwards so why wouldn't that one be.
A compiler without a linker has limited usefulness. Emitting actual ARM65 opcodes isn't the hurdle. The application binary interface on macOS is different than the linker.
Need a complete 'target' platform tool chain. The x86 target for macOS specific stuff is different enough that need new adjustments for the toolchain.
"running" gcc (the compiler itself) and getting some output isn't the primary issue.
Isn't "Quartz" built on top of the OpenGL stack? Even if gcc comes along later this XServer is skating on thin ice on a new GPU that Apple isn't going to provide any fixes for if problems pop up ( OpenGL deprecated ) .
That's about 400 lines of code to get a proof-of-concept VM up and running. Impressive.
I notice from Twitter that someone's even managed to run x86 linux under SimpleVM using QEMU.
This is the sort of thing that I usually like playing with, though I'm too busy right now. A while back, I had x86 Ubuntu running in Docker on a Raspberry Pi 3, so I would expect Apple Silicon Docker to be able to also run x86 images.
I notice from Twitter that someone's even managed to run x86 linux under SimpleVM using QEMU.
This is the sort of thing that I usually like playing with, though I'm too busy right now. A while back, I had x86 Ubuntu running in Docker on a Raspberry Pi 3, so I would expect Apple Silicon Docker to be able to also run x86 images.