M1 Big Sur Failed to Power on Windows 10 VMK

[dharvey1221]

Purchased a M1 Mac Mini used time machine to transfer data

Time Machine backup from MBP Catalina running VM Fusion Pro 12.1

Failed to power on '/Users/xxxxxxx/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/Windows 10 x64 (original).vmwarevm/Windows 10 x64.vmx'

Does Fusion not support Rosetta2?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  I have uninstalled and reinstalled Fusion.  

[scott28tt]

@dharvey1221 

Fusion doesn’t power on VMs on the M1 hardware yet, there are numerous threads here on that topic.

[SRainer]

I have the same problem. Any solution found yet? - Why is it possible to install it on a M1 but cannot use?

[scott28tt]

@SRainer 

It will require an updated version of Fusion to be made available, you can learn more from existing threads by searching this forum area for "M1".

[ColoradoMarmot]

We will likely see a version that can boot ARM based VM's, but one that supports Intel based VM's is a lot of work, and may or may not ever come.  The Fusion UI itself runs under rosetta, but none of the virtualization code will work.

And just a note to the OP:  Time Machine backups are completely unreliable for virtual machines.  *strongly* suggest using a separate dedicated backup mechanism for VM's.

The net is that if you need to run intel windows right now, you'll need an intel machine for the foreseeable future.

[dharvey1221]

Cool thanks.  I've seen reviews of people running VMs and I guess just I assumed it was Fusion on Rosetta 2.   

[ColoradoMarmot]

Everything that's currently out is only ARM based guests.  There's hacks with some open source stuff, and a really rough preview of another commercial product, but nothing production ready.  VMWare tweeted that they're working on an ARM guest version, and I'm sure they're waiting until it's much more real and viable to release (beyond just a tech concept).  My personal (no inside baseball info) guess is that we'll see that in Q1.

For intel guests it gets a lot fuzzier.  If apple enables the hypervisor framework to leverage rosetta, then we might see it.  If not, building your own CPU emulator is a huge amount of work - even microsoft is discovering that as they try to build x86/64 emulation on windows for ARM.  BTW, that's my best guess for a near-term solution for intel workloads - windows arm, with windows based emulation, running inside fusion.  the problem there is that windows arm is only sold to OEM's so there's no retail option.

[Qwareeq]

Is the support issue solved from VMware side or not yet

[Qwareeq]

May you elaborate more, which version you are refering to

[Technogeezer]

Agreed with @ColoradoMarmot. Apple Silicon is forcing some hard choices here.

For all the good that Rosetta does it's solving a different and simpler problem than what would be needed to support an operating system. Rosetta focuses on translation/emulation for user-mode x86 applications and uses some very clever approaches to do it (for example, translating/caching the entire x86 app into ARM code at first invocation and letting all system calls run in native ARM code). It does provide a subset of the x86 architecture and doesn't have to deal with:

• multiple processes/threads creation, management and "time slicing" 
• user/system context switches 
• memory mapping, hardware page tables and memory access enforcement
• system/user mode operation 
• privileged instructions
• device I/O and interrupts

that would be required to support an operating system. For user-mode applications, macOS does all the above so Rosetta doesn't have to.

I've seen reports about QEMU emulating x86 on ARM. Yes it works, but from what I'm hearing the speed is nothing to write home about. 

Unfortunately the transition is (still) not good news for Mac users that depend on x86 operating systems at this point in time. 

[Technogeezer]

> Is the support issue solved from VMware side or not yet

There is no change at this time from what I've heard. VMware won't indicate when and they also have not released a tech preview of Fusion on M1 Macs.

[ColoradoMarmot]

And I really expect it to only be ARM guests.  I've been testing shadow.tech, which shows a *lot* of promise for my gaming workloads.  I think that some sort of cloud intel platform will be the ultimate answer for those workloads.