Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtotheh | Hacker News Reader

I've been using UTM, it seems to work OK. I use arm64 images, I haven't tried x86_64 images. Works for Windows and Debian.

View on HN

UTM isn’t a direct analog to tart; tart is scriptable extremely easily and there’s an accompanying Packer plugin for it, so it’s a breeze to completely automate the creation of VM images, distribute them via a container registry, as well as create and destroy VMs created from those images. It’s a single tool which does all the things an automated CI system needs to be able to do.

x86_64 runs using QEMU for emulation, and it's incredibly slow. I'd call it practically unusable.

Hard agree, it does a decent job emulating an x86 container. However Angular builds were still painfully slow.

For running an x64 container, I'd recommend running aarch64 Linux and then running the container using Rosetta 2, that yields significantly better performance than running everything through QEMU.

Wait what? I thought Rosetta 2 only worked in MacOS? Where does aarch64 Linux fit in this picture?

See https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

Coincidentally I set this up last night under UTM (https://docs.getutm.app/advanced/rosetta/) and it worked astonishingly well. Outside of Rosetta, the native virt seemed a bit slower than whatever UTM does normally, but perfectly usable on my M1 MBP.

If you're saying the rest of the aarch64 VM got slower after enabling Rosetta 2, that's unfortunately expected. Under Linux, TSO is enabled for everything, even aarch64 processes when Rosetta is active. On macOS, TSO is selectively enabled only for the x64 processes and leaves everything else alone.

MacOS 9 (PPC)runs OK. A little slow (macbook air m2)

https://mac.getutm.app/gallery/

After installing UTM, did your Mac experience a noticeable slow down, even when no VMs are running? It was frustrating enough for me to uninstall it altogether.

When using UTM on M2 MacBook. Blazing fast Debian vm and the host Mac.

The networking on other hand is doing my head in.

I've been using arm64 debian and nixos with no slow downs, 32GB memory. I don't care to try x86_64 emulation personally, but the native linux version run well in my experience. The only annoying thing I've found was that while video would run smooth there was anywhere from 100-500ms delay in the sound playing youtube in the VM.

Slightly off topic but I tried nixos on a laptop with just 4GB and it ran out of memory doing a refresh of some sort (a nix noob at the moment)

My reading suggests I am stuffed but I feel the goal is worthwhile. There does not seem to be a minimum ram requirement but if you had any pointers Inwoukd be grateful

I have ollamam jellyfin and keep a utm with kali open at all times. I don't notice any slowdowns.

Chip: Apple M1 Max Total Number of Cores: 10 (8 performance and 2 efficiency) Memory: 64 GB

Any idea how this compares with UTM in terms of features or what it's intended use-case or strengths are?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com