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Not sure why this recommends emulation instead of installing the native ARM images referenced near the top of the page?
Yeah I was wondering too. The big advantage of UTM, apart from that it's free, is IMO that it can run natively on Apple ARM cpu's.
Maybe I'm just really out of my depth on this, but it feels like there's not a lot of information about _why_ these particular steps and tools are used. Why are 4 different Linux images needed? Why are there all of these steps to create a one-time use "init.iso"? Is it just so the cloud-init script can run? I see the call to mkisofs is referencing "cidata", but it's the only place in the whole page that "cidata" show…
My thought was why use UTM? Most of this can be achieved with qemu alone :). But it showed me something new. The cloud init tool was new to me. From my toolbox I would have used ansible or something. But I think it very interesting that this runs all automatically during first boot. But I agree one needs to read between the lines to understand what the purpose of this post is. As you said it reads like a overcomplica…
Afaik UTM uses Qemu under the hood, but provides a nice UI on top for the basic use cases. It also has a library of prepared images, so that your VM is a few clicks away from intention to have one.
It can also modify the VM, resize storage after creation etc.
Of course all of it can be done with QEMU alone, but this makes it easier to deal with than remembering tons of QEMU command line arguments.
source "utm-cloud" "this" { iso_url = "${path.root}/dev_images/al2023-kvm-2023.6.20250303.0-kernel-6.1-x86_64.xfs.gpt.qcow2" iso_checksum = "sha256:0dc2797fe19847f6c75878dd344ab478ac0657077d9a15f2907bb2df41d8c3de" vm_arch = "x86_64" cpus = 2 memory = 4096 display_nopause = true boot_nopause = true export_nopause = true skip_nat_mapping = true communicator = "ssh" ssh_clear_authorized_keys = true ssh_private_key_file = data.sshkey.this.private_key_path ssh_host = "192.168.64.100" ssh_port = 22 ssh_username = "ec2-user" shutdown_command = "echo 'packer' | sudo -S /sbin/halt -h -p" use_cd = true cd_label = "cidata" cd_content = { "meta-data" = <<EOF local-hostname: vm-hostname EOF "user-data" = <<EOF #cloud-config ssh_sftp: enabled: true password: ec2-user ssh_pwauth: True chpasswd: expire: False users: - default - name: ec2-user lock_passwd: false plain_text_passwd: ec2-user ssh_authorized_keys: - ${data.sshkey.this.public_key} EOF "network-config" = <<EOF #cloud-config version: 2 ethernets: enp0s1: # dhcp4: yes addresses: - 192.168.64.100/24 gateway4: 192.168.64.1 nameservers: addresses: - 10.0.2.2 enp0s2: dhcp4: no state: down EOF } }
Not sure why this recommends emulation instead of installing the native ARM images referenced near the top of the page?
Yeah I was wondering too. The big advantage of UTM, apart from that it's free, is IMO that it can run natively on Apple ARM cpu's.
I really like UTM, I especially like UTM remote on the iPad. The issue is that of course Apple computers that are large enough to run VMs are… expensive. So I have instead found myself using proxmox on a cheaper (by comparison) threadripper machine. The added bonus is that xterm.js (the default LXC console viewer) works wonderfully on the iPad- Though of course you can use prompt3 for heavier duty stuff. The other us…
Expensive compared to what? UTM uses Apple Virtualization Framework, which lets the guest VM only occupy as much memory as it's actually using (instead of reserving all of its available memory). This means it's viable to run a Linux VM on e.g. an 8GB RAM MacBook Air.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My thought was why use UTM? Most of this can be achieved with qemu alone :). But it showed me something new. The cloud init tool was new to me. From my toolbox I would have used ansible or something. But I think it very interesting that this runs all automatically during first boot. But I agree one needs to read between the lines to understand what the purpose of this post is. As you said it reads like a overcomplica…
> My thought was why use UTM? Most of this can be achieved with qemu alone :) qemu needs to be studied a bit, UTM is fairly intuitive. I recently decided to learn how to create VMs with bare qemu (using the command-line). As I have an arm macbook for work, UTM helped me a ton with aarch64 virtual machines because I could enable debug log and see what qemu options/flags/switches would UTM use. Unrelated: I have some i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My thought was why use UTM? Most of this can be achieved with qemu alone :). But it showed me something new. The cloud init tool was new to me. From my toolbox I would have used ansible or something. But I think it very interesting that this runs all automatically during first boot. But I agree one needs to read between the lines to understand what the purpose of this post is. As you said it reads like a overcomplica…
> My thought was why use UTM? Most of this can be achieved with qemu alone :) qemu needs to be studied a bit, UTM is fairly intuitive. I recently decided to learn how to create VMs with bare qemu (using the command-line). As I have an arm macbook for work, UTM helped me a ton with aarch64 virtual machines because I could enable debug log and see what qemu options/flags/switches would UTM use. Unrelated: I have some i…
Hmm I haven't tried x86 linux on utm on an arm mac (i have an x86 linux box i can ssh in), but i tried x86 windows. It was so slow as to be unusable. Edit: would command line linux be usable, considering it doesn't have to emulate all those pixels?