MacOS Virtualization

Notes on macos virtualization with a focus on running guest OS on Apple M1 Silicon

Tutorials

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/running_macos_in_a_virtual_machine_on_apple_silicon_macs

macos images

https://mrmacintosh.com/macos-12-monterey-full-installer-database-download-directly-from-apple/

Docker

Docker corp instructions for running AMD64 linux images on M1 macs using Rosetta.
https://docs.docker.com/desktop/mac/install/

Simon Willison's Docker on M1 Tutorial
https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/running-docker-on-remote-m1

Running Macos in a docker container
https://hakin9.org/docker-osx-run-mac-in-a-docker-container/

Running X64 Linux containers via Podman
https://edofic.com/posts/2021-09-12-podman-m1-amd64/

UTM

UTM uses QEMU to run virtual machines (and containers?) on Macos. It can be thought of as a free alternative to Parallels. https://github.com/utmapp/UTM

Does QEMU use the new Apple Virtualization framework or the old Apple Hypervisor Framework?

The context of my question is running X86 virtual machines on Apple Silicon. From what I can tell QEMU does not implement the new Virtualization Framework. The VM app UTM appears to support both QEMU, and then UTM natively supports Apple Virtualization Framework.

https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/blob/master/target/arm/hvf/hvf.c?ref_type=heads

The QEMU changelog is kind of useless, it doesn't appear to be in-repo; and on the website it is broken up over several pages. https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog

Are these docs contradictory?

https://lima-vm.io/docs/config/multi-arch/#fast-mode-2

Rosetta is known to be much faster than QEMU User Mode Emulation. Rosetta is available for VZ instances on ARM hosts.
https://lima-vm.io/docs/config/vmtype/#vz

Virtualization.framework doesn’t support running “intel guest on arm” and vice versa

https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/6.2

On macOS hosts with Apple Silicon CPUs we now support the 'hvf' accelerator for running AArch64 guests

https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/8.2

User-mode emulation runtime Since this release, qemu linux-user implements and provides vdso for most popular architectures. arm/arm64/aarch64

Emulated /proc/cpuinfo output in linux-user

What is VDSO? Virtual Dynamic Shared Object
https://www.baeldung.com/linux/vdso-vsyscall-memory-regions

Why does qemu/target/arm/arm64/aarch64 not exist in QEMU sources? C.f. /qemu/target/i386/hvf(Apple Hypervisor Framework)

https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/tree/master/target/i386/hvf

Reference

The electric Light Company freeware utilities
https://eclecticlight.co/downloads/

The Electric Light Company M1 Macs articles
https://eclecticlight.co/m1-macs/

Investigating sandbox logging
https://ubrigens.com/posts/sandbox_coverage.html

VirtIO documentation
https://docs.oasis-open.org/virtio/virtio/v1.3/virtio-v1.3.html

Apple Documentation

Hypervisor Documentation
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor

App Sandbox in depth legacy documentation
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Security/Conceptual/AppSandboxDesignGuide/AppSandboxInDepth/AppSandboxInDepth.html

App Sandbox modern documentation
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/app_sandbox

Code Signing Provisioning Profiles
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3125-inside-code-signing-provisioning-profiles

Checking app entitlements
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/qa/qa1798/_index.html

Security landing page https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/

macos / Darwin man pages
https://ss64.com/osx/
https://keith.github.io/xcode-man-pages/

Useful Macos Commands

security - Command line interface to keychains and Security framework
https://keith.github.io/xcode-man-pages/security.1.html

plutil - Property list utility
https://keith.github.io/xcode-man-pages/plutil.1.html

certtool - Create key pairs, certificates and certificate signing requests for use with Keychains
https://keith.github.io/xcode-man-pages/certtool.1.html

codesign - Create and manipulate code signatures
https://keith.github.io/xcode-man-pages/codesign.1.html

AriESQ/macos_virtualization

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