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Development on Apple Silicon with UTM

rkiselenko.dev

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Re: Development on Apple Silicon with UTM

#3
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 uses I have for VMs on the mac is Docker and Kubernetes, but those are solved by colima and minikube respectively.

Re: Development on Apple Silicon with UTM

#5

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.

Re: Development on Apple Silicon with UTM

#7

Not sure why this recommends emulation instead of installing the native ARM images referenced near the top of the page?

A lot of dev tooling still expects x86_64. Example off the top of my head, Cosmopolitan will not build ARM binaries and will not compile on ARM. (But it WILL build x86_64 universal binaries that will run on Apple Silicon and macOS via Rosetta.)

There is also the issue of wanting to have your dev environment be as close to your prod environment as possible, and the vast majority of cloud-based hosting is still x86_64.

Re: Development on Apple Silicon with UTM

#8
post #7

Not sure why this recommends emulation instead of installing the native ARM images referenced near the top of the page?

A lot of dev tooling still expects x86_64. Example off the top of my head, Cosmopolitan will not build ARM binaries and will not compile on ARM. (But it WILL build x86_64 universal binaries that will run on Apple Silicon and macOS via Rosetta.) There is also the issue of wanting to have your dev environment be as close to your prod environment as possible, and the vast majority of cloud-based hosting is still x86_64.

With virtualisation you can use Rosetta 2 for Linux to run x86_64 binaries. That's what I do and it's more efficient.

Re: Development on Apple Silicon with UTM

#9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of dev tooling still expects x86_64. Example off the top of my head, Cosmopolitan will not build ARM binaries and will not compile on ARM. (But it WILL build x86_64 universal binaries that will run on Apple Silicon and macOS via Rosetta.) There is also the issue of wanting to have your dev environment be as close to your prod environment as possible, and the vast majority of cloud-based hosting is still x86_64.

With virtualisation you can use Rosetta 2 for Linux to run x86_64 binaries. That's what I do and it's more efficient.

UTM uses Rosetta via qemu. It’s the most direct way of emulating x86 on Apple Silicon, using native Apple emulation layer.
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