The M1/M2/M3 Mac ARM 7.0 Beta Technical Preview is a work in progress that will take some time to complete. The eventual goal is to run typical modern Intel/AMD x86 32 and 64 bit OS's on an ARM M1/M2 Mac.
The latest reported working Windows OS is XP 32-bit.
The latest possible Mac, Linux, or Solaris OS will be shown as soon as it is reported.
ARM OS's will not yet run in the Beta.
The devs are continuing development on the Beta. They also plan to have an ARM on ARM Virtualbox hypervisor eventually.
No dates for expected final development of these goals have been or will be released.
(mod edit: original topic title "Windows XP on Apple M1: 2 hour-install + Crash". Stickied to point out Aeichners' and Klaus's comment on the M1 version of 7.0 Beta below: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=106919&p=523035#p523069)
Klaus wrote:In a way the ARM64 package "slipped out", and it's not expected to work reliably. The implementation isn't complete yet (which is what you saw), and in top of that the performance is known to be extremely low. It isn't anywhere near production ready, we know. This will not change for VirtualBox 7, and the "Technology Preview" marker will stay for the foreseeable future, indicating that it won't be supported at all.
At best you'll get some really old 32-bit Linux to run to some degree, such as DSL 4.4.10. No chance even with Ubuntu 16.04 i386.
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original question follows:
Windows XP on Apple M1: it took me 2 hour-install + Crash at the end. VM Aborted.
Both the performance and stability is horrible, I really think that this feature needs to be disabled. (perhaps re-introduce Qemu's re-compiler is a better way, after all ... or just disable ability to run x86 in emulation mode)... this feature is absolutely not ready for v7.0 release.
Treat the M1 build as a very very early technical preview please, the Beta label is completely misleading and will be changed (this comes from the automated build system and aligns with the rest of the builds). There will be no official support for M1 with 7.0, not even for ARM virtualization, let alone x86 emulation on ARM.
In a way the ARM64 package "slipped out", and it's not expected to work reliably. The implementation isn't complete yet (which is what you saw), and in top of that the performance is known to be extremely low. It isn't anywhere near production ready, we know. This will not change for VirtualBox 7, and the "Technology Preview" marker will stay for the foreseeable future, indicating that it won't be supported at all.
At best you'll get some really old 32-bit Linux to run to some degree, such as DSL 4.4.10. No chance even with Ubuntu 16.04 i386.
I'm a little confused here. I was under the impression that the goal of the port to macOS on M1/M2 was to *virtualize* compatible OSs, i.e. Linux distributions on ARM64, or Windows on ARM when that one becomes available.
*Emulating* X64 on ARM64 would be nice to have, but has obvious performance limitations. I *do not* expect Virtualbox (or plain QEMU) to provide me with a way to run, say Windows 10 X64 on my M1 MacBook.
agodfrin wrote:I'm a little confused here. I was under the impression that the goal of the port to macOS on M1/M2 was to *virtualize* compatible OSs
There has been no port to M1/M2. All there has been is early work that does nothing useful but somehow escaped the stables. You can safely forget all about it for now.
And just for clarity (based on additional questions being raised in the forums): VirtualBox is not and never has been an ARM hypervisor. The M1/M2 developer preview relies on an Intel code simulator module to run x86 (32bit) single core guests. Incredibly slowly. It's currently more of a toy than a serious solution to any problem.
klaus wrote: ↑21. Jun 2023, 21:52
"never" is an awfully long time. it's an open secret (visible in the dev source code repository on virtualbox.org) that we're working on making the x86 emulation on ARM better (faster, less buggy, ...). This should eventually be good enough to run the usual 32-bit and 64-bit Windows versions and many Linux distributions. We're also working on ARM-on-ARM which will allow you to run Linux distros supporting aarch64 (and once Microsoft makes it possible to get a legal version also Windows/ARM).
