macos m1/m2 arm - developer preview missing

[peteL]

I went to download the developer preview for Virtualbox on Apple silicon and noted its not on the virtualbox dot org downloads page anymore.

Has it moved?

Is it gone?

I'm not looking at running x86, just arm64 linux.

[mpack]

I have no idea where the M1/M2 dev preview has gone. However...

I'm not looking at running x86, just arm64 linux.

No such feature exists, nor is it likely to exist IMO. VirtualBox has never been an ARM hypervisor. On MacOS-ARM hosts it is purely an x86 simulator, and so is very slow.

Next up: being an ARM hypervisor won't be easy. A hypervisor needs to emulate a complete working hardware platform in addition to supervising (or hypervising) the CPU. On Intel CPUs the choice of which hardware platform to emulate is easy - we emulate a slightly aging WinTel PC.

There is no obvious standard ARM hardware platform to emulate - so there would be little chance of running an off-the-shelf ARM64 Linux even if VirtualBox was an ARM hypervisor. The ARM64 Linux you find would have to be purposely ported to the VirtualBox-ARM64 target.

Perhaps you might suggest M1/M2 Apple as a viable hardware platform, or perhaps Raspberry Pi. I don't know if either can provide a viable paying market needed to fund the necessary development of a complete suite of hardware simulations.

[peteL]

The why's aren't important here.

It's my mistake if you can't run ARM64 kernels on macos with Virtualbox. I was under the impression that you could.

You can do this with VMWare Fusion, Parallels and with UTM. I thought Virtualbox would be the same.

I know UTM uses Apples virtualization framework. I'm not sure on Fusion and Parallels.

[scottgus1]

It appears the M1/M2 beta is still available on the https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Testbuilds

An ARM on ARM hypervisor is a long-term stated goal for Virtualbox, see the M1/M2 sticky on the Mac Hosts forum. But it doesn't exist now.

[aior]

For 7.10.0, maybe it has not been build. For now, Latest 7.0.x test builds is 7.0.9 beta4 which is listed in the page 'https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Testbuilds'. So it has been listed in the page 'https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads' for 7.10.0 as it was done for 7.0.8 before.

[fth0]

Given the current state of VirtualBox for x86 guests on arm64 hosts, IMHO it doesn't really make sense to provide more than the current development snapshot.

[aeichner]

We decided to pull the 7.0 ARM builds because they don't see any significant progress apart from the usual fixes the other packages get as well. No performance improvements will be backported to 7.0. If one wants to have a peek whats cooking for VirtualBox on ARM use the development testbuilds.

Regarding the statement that one can't run standard Linux distros on ARM64 I'll just leave the following screenshot as a teaser

vbox.jpeg (108.56 KiB) Viewed 7898 times

[scottgus1]

Aeichner, thanks for the info! I see the "Arm64" text on these VMs. Are these actually ARM OS's? Or regular Intel/AMD x86 OS's?

Also, a post like this on the M1/M2 sticky will really help folks who we send the sticky link to.

[klaus]

These are really Linux distros for ARM. No trace of x86 there.

It is too early for providing a sticky post. It currently needs too many magic spells and isn't really configurable, ...

[mpack]

Regarding the statement that one can't run standard Linux distros on ARM64 I'll just leave the following screenshot as a teaser

AFAICS the logic I described earlier remains valid. Until I see what hardware platform is being simulated and how Linux and Windows ARM based distros get compatibility with the virtual hardware platform, and how this will be compatible with presumed commercial goals... I don't think a screenshot showing a few Linux logos is going to sway me!

I assume that ideally the platform would be a cross of WinPC hardware with an ARM processor, if that is practical.

[aeichner]

There is no special hardware platform required, nowadays most Linux distros use a generic kernel of the time on modern ARM systems and use what is called a "Flattened Device Tree" which describes the hardware of the system (interrupt assignments, where memory is located, where the device as located). Windows is a bit different because it requires ACPI which we don't currently implement for ARM. VBox emulates a virtual platform using an EFI firmware and generates the device tree on the fly based on the config of the VM, it also includes a standard PCIe bus allowing us to support most of the devices we support on x86 on ARM as well. And the screenshot I posted shows an ArchLinux ARM guest running happily (including guest additions and VMSVGA as the graphics controller).