Instead of buying an expensive Parallels or VMWare Fusion license to run a VM of Linux (slowly) on the M1, you can use the free Universal Turing Machine (UTM) app.

Luckily, the most common VM that an IT systems administrator or developer will install is Linux, and ARM versions of Linux have been common for well over a decade now. And while it’s possible to run virtual machines of both Windows and Linux operating systems made for the Intel platform on the M1, the performance cost of translating Intel instructions to ARM is high (even with the optimizations Apple has within their M1 CPU). One of the biggest worries that IT pros have regarding Apple’s new ARM-based M1 platform is the ability to run virtual machines (VMs) of other operating systems using hypervisor software. Whether you're learning the Linux operating system, using Linux to manage your server fleet in the cloud, performing a cybersecurity penetration test using Linux tools or testing the web apps you’ve created on a Linux server, you can do it at near-native speed without costly software on an M1-based Mac system.

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With Windows 10 for ARM, you can then run x86 applications using Microsoft's emulation features. Other products may exist for running virtual machines on M1 Macs (like Parallels) but they can only virtualize other ARM-based operating systems, and that includes Windows 10. A new M1 Mac is basically a super-powerful Raspberry Pi. The software actually does very little itself and just sets up and coordinates a lot of activity between the user and their hardware.Īpple M1 is an ARM-based 'system on a chip' platform and is entirely different from not only an x86 CPU but also its entire underlying hardware platform (BIOS, UEFI, etc.). VirtualBox currently runs on x86-64 hardware and utilizes Intel VT-x or AMD-V hardware virtualization technology.

Virtualbox on mac m1