Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjtheblunt | Hacker News Reader

you can run Arch proper in UTM.app on macos...utm is available on the app store or open source, and wraps the apple silicon hypervisor.framework.

it works fantastic magic. i had dual booted Asahi for a year or so, but really for no good reason once i realized UTM existed.

View on HN

I'm aware of it, though I would like to have a native solution with GPU acceleration and all the hardware benefits.

Do you use x64 emulation with UTM? If so, how's the performance?

No. It's all native Arm. In the UTM app, when creating a new VM, there's an option to say it's going to be "Linux" (generically at that point), which exposes a checkbox which allows you to specify use of Apple Silicon hypervisor.framework, and specifically _not_ x86 emulation.

I use hypervisor.framework, never use x86 emulation, and the result is great. Tested with both Fedora for ARM and Arch for ARM (perhaps CachyOS's bundling of Arch works there, but i did it lower level because i'm an old nerd).

This is what I thought, but idk why the literature about this is never clear that it's ARM Linux only.

which literature? (that question posed, i had to sleuth around to disambiguate oft repeated misinformation before figuring this all out)

I don't have it in front of me, have just seen conflicting info on a lot on articles about virtualization on Mac.

Well wait, UTM's official website clearly says it does support x86 if you're ok with the emu performance hit. Is that wrong?

It does support x86 at higher performance costs.

that checkbox i mentioned above lets you choose to use native Apple ARM via the hypervisor.framework, or use Qemu which lets you do the x86 emulation?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com