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1. Apple M1 Vmware Update
2. Apple M1 Vmware Linux
3. Apple M1 Vmware Driver

Recently I purchased an M1 equipped 13” MacBook Pro. Overall the machine has been absolutely amazing however I have 1 big issue transitioning from my old Intel Hackintosh:

• Missing macOS guest VMs

Originally Answered: Can you run VMWare on Macs with Apple’s M1 chip? Currently you cannot run VMWare on Macs with Apple’s M1 chip. However, VMWare has announced that they are actively working on updating VMWare Fusion for Apple’s M1 but they cannot yet provide a timeline for when that will be. Dec 09, 2020 The 3.5.1 sensor will support macOS 11 Big Sur on both Intel and M1 Apple devices and will offer support for both KEXT and System Extensions. For M1 devices, the release will use Rosetta 2 as VMware continues to work on building native cross compilation support into a future release. VMWare Will Support M1 Macs Soon, Offering More Ways to Run Windows 2 likes. 5 shares tomshardware.com. 6d VMWare's product line manager said the company will add support for Apple's M1 chip soon.

While its clear that both Parallels and VMWare will support Apple Silicon with macOS guests in the future, the question is when. Additionally, it’s also unclear if we’ll ever get x86 emulation from them or if its strictly ARM64 only. A bit of a shame especially as I do frequently boot old macOS VMs versions to check for bugs.

To get around this, I wanted to see if our good ol friend QEMU can help us out and do full x86 emulation.

For today’s experiment, we’ll try and see if we can get to the macOS recovery environment with a vanilla macOS BaseSystem. Of course we’ll be getting a bit of help from OpenCore to move this along.

Getting started

Before we beging, we’ll need a few things:

• UTM
  • A very nice wrapper for QEMU in macOS, additionally also supports iOS
  • See here about installing on iOS: Install
• OpenCore Image
  • Our bootloader to help launch macOS, there’s a few options to choose from:
    • EFI-MODERN: macOS 10.15 and newer supported
    • EFI-LEGACY: Mac OS X 10.6 through 10.14 supported
    • EFI-i386: Mac OS X 10.4 through 10.7 supported
• OVMF Binary
  • Our UEFI image for QEMU
    • Note we want edk2.git-ovmf-x64 specifically
    • iOS Users can download the pre-extracted image here: OVMF.bin
• macOS Image
  • See macrecovery in OpenCorePkg on how to download from Apple’s servers
    • This should provide you with a BaseSystem/RestoreImage.dmg for use to play with
  • For educational purposes, I’ve also provided a pre-installed OS image:
    • Catalina-SETUP.qcow2(Mirror)

To start, open up the UTM.dmg and add UTM.app to the Applications/ folder.

• For iOS users, see here: UTM iOS Install

Next, download OVMF from the Qemu firmware repo and run the following:

From here, we can open UTM.app and get started:

We’ll first want to make a fresh VM, here I’ll list a few of the required settings to boot:

System

• Architecture: x86_64
• System: Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009)
• Memory: 4096MB
• Force Multicore: True
  • Note forcing multicore greatly increases the VM speed, however bugs may appear with this.

QEMU

• -cpu
• Penryn,+ssse3,+sse4.1,+sse4.2

Drives

• OVMF.bin:
  • Image Type: BIOS
• EFI.img:
  • Image Type: Disk Image
  • Interface: USB
• BaseSystem.dmg:
  • Image Type: Disk Image
  • Interface: USB
• Extra Disk(If you plan to install macOS):
  • Image Type: Disk Image
  • Interface: USB
  • Size: 30720(ie. 32GB)

Network

• Enabled: True
• Emulated Network Card: VMWare Paravirlulized Ethernet V3

Once these are all done, we can now boot our VM!

Booting the VM

The boot process is slow however, and I mean very slow. But after 17min(Reduced to 8min with Force Multicore) we finally reach macOS’s recovery screen!

The OS is unusable to say the least, and unfortunately won’t get much better even with tinkering. However the fact QEMU is able to emulate an Intel Penryn PC so well is quite remarkable, and OpenCore has made this much easier to build and boot.

Bonus pic, installed Catalina!

Bonus pic x2, High Sierra Geekbench scores!

Troubleshooting

No mouse control

If your mouse doesn’t work, try pressing Control+Option+Arrows

Recovery Contact Error: 1

For Recovery Server contact errors, verify your time is correct in the VM by opening terminal:

Recovery Contact Error: 2

If you continue to have Recovery Connection issues, open terminal and run the following:

Can’t start x86 VM in macOS 11.2 RC 20D53

Apple M1 Vmware Update

This is a known issue, using QEMU’s TCG in the latest beta will crash QEMUHelper that UTM relies on. Current solution is to downgrade to 11.2 beta 2 (20D5042d) or older.

We’ve reported a feedback to Apple regarding this:

Apple M1 Vmware Linux

• Feedback ID: FB8978379

Apple M1 Vmware Driver

UPDATE: @osy discovered that in the 11.2 RC 20D53, Apple now blocks mprotect on MAP_JIT regions. QEMU uses mprotect to guard pages at the end of the JIT region. This means that QEMU will most likely need to be updated to either remove the ASSERT or guard the page after MAP_JIT instead. UTM has already been updated for this: qemu: fix crash on macOS 11.2