![]() To perform these assessments, I built Viable, my own lightweight virtualiser app in Swift, based on Apple’s example code, which provides an excellent start. The big question over this lightweight, simple virtualisation is whether it can perform as well as a commercial alternative. ![]() My own basic test app is a mere 200 KB in size. As a result, indie developers are already offering free apps using Apple’s Virtualization features. Virtualization offers a higher level, where most key services are already available, and merely have to be configured and integrated into a simple virtualiser app. To implement a full environment at that level requires a lot of code to support accelerated graphics, storage, network and other devices, and is a major undertaking. MacOS offers two levels of virtualisation support: Hypervisor is a lower level used more commonly by commercial virtualisation software such as Parallels. Apple has recently blurred this a little by allowing ARM Linux guests to take advantage of Rosetta 2 translation to run Intel apps for Linux in an ARM Linux guest, but you can’t virtualise any Intel operating system as a guest on an Apple silicon host. Thus, on an Apple silicon host computer you can run guest operating systems including Universal versions of macOS and Linux built for ARM, but not macOS or Linux for Intel hardware. In this context, virtualisation lets you run a different operating system for the same processor architecture, not one for a different processor architecture. This article asks how well it works in practice. ![]() Virtualisation may not seem something to get excited about, but it has become sufficiently simple and versatile on Apple silicon Macs to have hit the headlines.
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