[Experts pls] Virtualization with Macbook Pro (M3 Pro Chip)

[devglass]

Hi, I will like to check anyone faced issues (i.e. lagging, not responsive) with running virtualization machines on the Macbook M3 Pro ARM chip?

Personally, I deal a lot of testing on different OS environment (i.e. Windows/ Ubuntu/ Linux) and thinking whether I should switch over to Mac OS to perform such development testing.

Appreciate if anyone using the new M3 Pro or M series could share your experiences here on the usage of VMs. Will like to hear advice first. Thanks a alot!

 

[davidktw]

Mac on Apple Silicon today can only visualise ARM64 instruction sets. Any x86/AMD64 instructions will be emulation. That is what Rosetta 2 is doing. Windows on ARMs are also capable to performing emulation for any Windows x86/AMD64 binaries when running inside VMs.

If you wanted run Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion on Apple Silicon, you can. The VMs may it be Windows/Mac/Linux/Unices will need to be ARM64 binaries.

In the case of using Parallels Desktop, you can integrate it with Rosetta 2 which will allow you to run x64 binaries within the LINUX VMs. It will also allow you to emulate x64 docker images within the Linux VM by passing the execution of x64 codes to rosetta 2 running inside the Mac OS X host via the binfmt_misc kernel feature.

I have done the above before. You can read up articles on these stuffs online.

 

[devglass]

Mac on Apple Silicon today can only visualise ARM64 instruction sets. Any x86/AMD64 instructions will be emulation. That is what Rosetta 2 is doing. Windows on ARMs are also capable to performing emulation for any Windows x86/AMD64 binaries when running inside VMs.

If you wanted run Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion on Apple Silicon, you can. The VMs may it be Windows/Mac/Linux/Unices will need to be ARM64 binaries.

In the case of using Parallels Desktop, you can integrate it with Rosetta 2 which will allow you to run x64 binaries within the LINUX VMs. It will also allow you to emulate x64 docker images within the Linux VM by passing the execution of x64 codes to rosetta 2 running inside the Mac OS X host via the binfmt_misc kernel feature.

I have done the above before. You can read up articles on these stuffs online.

Thanks David