Friday, April 30, 2021

VMware Fusion on Apple Silicon Later This Year

VMware (tweet):

However, for those that need to run another operating system like Linux or Windows, Rosetta 2 doesn’t support Virtualization, and Apple silicon Macs don’t support Boot Camp. That means it’s time for us to innovate and rebuild our beloved desktop hypervisor for Macs, VMware Fusion, to support the next generation of Apple hardware.

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Even with that said, and note that I’m using ‘debug’ builds which perform slower, in my 12 years at VMware I’ve never seen VMs boot and run like this.

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And as far as we are aware, there is no way to buy a Windows 10 ARM license for a Mac with Apple silicon.

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So, to be a bit blunt, running x86 operating systems on Apple silicon is not something we are planning to deliver with this project.

So no testing older versions of macOS, either.

That said, the team is planning to deliver a Public Tech Preview of VMware Fusion for macOS on Apple silicon before the end of this year, and we can’t wait to get it in the hands of every Apple silicon Mac owner.

Previously:

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Hopefully, someone will come out with an efficient way to virtualize (or at least emulate if virtualization is not possible) from Mac OS X 10.6.8 Server Snow Leopard (useful to open PowerPC applications like Eudora Mail, Palm Desktop or Canvas) to macOS 10.14 Mojave (Intel with 32-bit applications), as well as Intel x86 Windows 10 (32-bit & 64-bit applications inside), in the new ARM-based Apple Silicon Macs.

Kevin Schumacher

@MaX, Is that all? I'm sure it'll be done by next week if your list is that short.

I _think_ they Windows on ARM includes an emulator for running 32- and 64-but x86 Windows apps. So once the licensing for running a windows ARM VM is sorted out, that will be a way to run x86 Windows apps.

Full x86/x64 emulation in Windows ARM first appeared in a Preview release 5-6 months ago. It sounds like they haven't quite worked out all the kinks.

"The x64 applications we tested on an original Surface Pro X mostly ran well, although some apps crashed or simply closed as soon as we opened them (and some crashed the first time but then worked happily)." -- March 2021, https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-on-arm-this-is-how-well-64-bit-emulation-is-working/

Not exactly Rosetta 2. It'll get there, but don't sell your Intel PC just yet.

@Jolin: you are correct. Windows X64 on Arm is only in beta builds right now, but it works. X32 is in all versions.
Licensing of ARM versions of Windows for M1 macs is still up in the air.

@max: what you are looking for is UTM, it’s a mac and IOS gui front end for qemu, which appears to be the only VM software that also supports processor emulation. The mac version is here. https://mac.getutm.app/

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