New VMware Fusion Public Tech Preview for Apple Silicon released

[joe1776]

Hey,

yesterday was a new VMware Fusion Public Tech Preview 21H1 released.

VMware-Fusion-e.x.p-19431034_arm64.dmg

File size: 83.56 MB

File type: dmg

Release Date: 2022-03-10

Build Number: 19431034

Does anybody know what changed?

[Technogeezer]

Actually the Apple Developer article does talk Apple Silicon Macs and about tools to install macOS into a virtual machine from a restore image. 

But @ColoradoMarmot is right, it is rudimentary. An example and nowhere near a production quality product. Especially if you are expecting things that VMware Fusion provides. Read and dig into what Apple posted and you'll find no GUI controls, for the VM, no suspend/restart, nothing other than a monolithic disk image, no snapshots, no host/guest sharing.

[cjchappas1]

UTM supports virtualizing Monterey on Apple Silicon. There are no spice tools so you can't get copy paste, etc, but you can easily use Remote Desktop to copy/paste and drag and drop files. It runs decently.

[cjchappas1]

You guys really need to put in some work. Ubuntu 20 LTS and 22 won't work without heavy hacking. 

[Technogeezer]

Curious about UTM. Are they running the Intel flavor of Monterey, or the Apple Silicon flavor?

[Technogeezer]

@cjchappas1 , what heavy hacking did you have to do to get 20.04 LTS and 22 to work? I ask because I maintain a tips and techniques document in the Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Documents section of this community.

The 22.04 Jammy pre-releases do have a bit of manual intervention to get working, but nothing that I’d call heavy. The big issue is that there’s something unique to the Ubuntu 5.15 kernel builds in Jammy that prevents booting without modifying the kernel arguments. This has been reported to both VMware and Canonical - personally I think Ubuntu has done something wonky since every other distro’s 5.15 kernel works without the same argument. 

[cjchappas1]

It’s apple silicon of course. It installs from an .Ipsw file like iPhones use. UTM handles all the downloading and everything. Performance is decent. Definitely usable. Windows 7 x64 on apple silicon UTM is too slow to be usable. I haven’t messed with parallels. Way overpriced 

[Technogeezer]

---

@cjchappas1 wrote:

It’s apple silicon of course. It installs from an .Ipsw file like iPhones use. UTM handles all the downloading and everything. Performance is decent. Definitely usable. Windows 7 x64 on apple silicon UTM is too slow to be usable. I haven’t messed with parallels. Way overpriced 

---

OK - when I hear UTM or QEMU being mentioned I immediately think of people trying to run x86_64 operating systems.

I assume you're trying to use Ubuntu Desktop. I've found that Ubuntu Server released aarch64 ISOs work fine on the Tech Preview, but it's then a pain to have to install all the graphical components you'd find in a desktop release.

Personally I put the blame more on Canonical than VMware. For some reason Canonical doesn't seem to want to release an ISO of Ubuntu Desktop that's usable for installation on the Tech Preview. - like other distros do. The only Desktop installation ISOs that I've had luck with (and are currently available) are the pre-release ones for 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" as noted in the TP guide. I also expect those to disappear once Jammy is released - that's what happened to Impish 21.10.

I wonder if I have QEMU installed I could take that .ipsw file and convert it into a VMDK file. That could then be usable under the TP. The process I'd use would be similar to what is done for NetBSD, that uses a disk image for installation. I'll have to give it a whirl and see if it works. 

[palter]

I have a macOS Monterey VM in UTM. I converted the disk image to a VMDK using qemu-img. Won't boot.

Reading the documentation for running macOS in a virtual machine on Apple's website, I'm not surprised it doesn't work. You have to create a VirtualMachine instance that's specifically configured as a Mac and VMware certainly doesn't support that yet.

[Technogeezer]

The AS boot process is somewhat unique ("proprietary"??) and not vanilla UEFI. Not surprising that it won't work in things other than the proof-of-concept code that Apple posted. 

This might be part of why @Mikero posted a while back that in order to virtualization of macOS for Apple Silicon they'd have to rely on a lot of Apple APIs and not entirely on existing VMware hypervisor code.

[treee]

---

@cookieme wrote:

1. This update doesn't seem to come through the auto update mechanism in the previous TP release. Is this expected?

---

Yes or no. It depends on when you ask that question. Lots of software companies use the swimming pool method for releasing updates. Which means you just don't jump in immediately but you check the water first. Some also spread software updates like oil on water: you start small and it gradually expands further and further.

In the first case the company will release the update on their website because only a small subset of their users will update that way. Then they wait a little to see if that small subset will swamp them with issues or not. If they do then they can refrain from spreading the update via the auto-update feature and fix what needs fixing first. If everything goes well they'll approve the auto-update and people will receive the update via that feature.

In the second case they'll just release it via the auto-update but only to a small number of installations which they gradually expand which means that some will see the update and some will not. I know Microsoft sometimes uses this to spread their bigger Windows updates (such as 21H1).

I have just used the auto-update in VMware Fusion TP to install the new (small) update and that went fine.

@Technogeezer UTM uses QEMU to run the virtual machines. These machines can either be virtualised or emulated. On Linux it is not too uncommon to be using QEMU together with KVM. In that case QEMU is the frontend for KVM as well as the tool providing the emulation. If you want to use something like Podman on macOS then you also need QEMU. Docker Desktop also uses it for the same reason Podman and UTM do: it is the part that allows it to run a vm with hypervisor.framework (and in case of podman and docker it is their own barebones Linux vm as both podman and docker are Linux-only).

---

[Technogeezer]

@treee good point about QEMU that I was aware of. My remark was more geared to the use case on Apple Silicon for full system emulation of Intel CPUs.