The main reason your virtual machines don’t run anymore is that VirtualBox runs as a hypervisor on your Mac, relying on the underlying processor to execute instructions rather than providing processor emulation through software. What nobody probably told you before you pressed the ‘Buy now’ button was that all your existing x86–64 machine you’d lovingly built using Vagrant and Virtualbox would no longer run! Why doesn’t it work? With ARM-based Linux distros, UTM makes use of the Apple Virtualization Framework for near-native speeds.If you’ve landed on this article, you may have recently upgraded to a shiny new Macbook Pro or similar running the new M1 processor. UTM also has the ability to emulate x86_64 on ARM, albeit with performance penalties. UTM is free and open-source, but the paid version in the Mac App Store provides automatic updates and helps support development. Under its skin is QEMU, a very old but still very good tool. UTM is another virtualization tool worth looking at, and it offers something the others currently do not. Right now this is a feature unique to Parallels and might be worth the cost alone.

The icing on the cake is the Coherence mode, allowing you to run Linux apps outside the main Parallels window, almost as if they were native to the Mac. Again, you'll require Linux distros with ARM builds, but Parallels makes it super simple to download and install them. You're looking at $100 for a perpetual license, but it works well and it's easy to use.

The latest version can be downloaded from the VMware website.Īlternatively, you can go for Parallels, but at a cost. VMware Fusion is available for Apple Silicon and allows you to run Linux VMs.

M1 apple virtualization