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I still don't understand why people thought the hypervisor vendors would magically be able to provide x86 Win environments on M1 Macs that worked like x86 Win e

I still don't understand why people thought the hypervisor vendors would magically be able to provide x86 Win environments on M1 Macs that worked like x86 Win environments on Intel macs. Virtualization isn't emulation. Expecting seamless execution of x86 Win code on an M1 Mac seems unreasonable to me. I was initially concerned about this, but I realized that I've almost completely stopped using local VMs at all in favor of VMs in our datacenter, and so ...

salamandersauce 5y ago
I don't think people were expecting magic but when we had x86 emulators to run Windows/DOS VMs back in the PPC and even 68k days with programs like SoftPC and Virtual PC being readily available and usable for business applications at least I can't really blame people for expecting Parallels and VMware to pivot their products to meet that need that was essentially what most people were using it in the first place for.
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  I mean, I've definitely met a number of folks who just assumed that running x86 Windows on M1 would work just the same as running it on an Intel Mac. As you note, emulation products existed prior to the Intel switch, and they would do in a pinch, but they were VERY slow because emulation != virtualization. Doing anything complex in an emulated environment was PAINFUL. Running Windows in a Parallels or VMWare virtual machine on my Intel Mac works VERY well, but no emulation product will deliver that level of performance. You could of course virtualize ARM Windows on an M1, I suppose, but then you're not in an Intel environment, and the ARM Windows software landscape is thin.
MisterTea 5y ago
Modern "programmers" don't know how computer work. Film at 11.
jlokier 5y ago
Virtualization isn't emulation, but emulation can be used for the same effect, to run VM images. That's where VMware started: The original VMware product started the whole x86 VM field before Intel provided any virtualization capabilities. VMware's first product, able to run Windows VMs smoothly in a window, was amazing compared to what had come before, and they did it before there were any x86 features for virtualization, using clever code scanning and emulation techniques. It's not at all obvious that they couldn't use similar clever techniques again, combined with Rosetta 2 style JIT - if they wanted to.

salamandersauce 5y ago

I don't think people were expecting magic but when we had x86 emulators to run Windows/DOS VMs back in the PPC and even 68k days with programs like SoftPC and Virtual PC being readily available and usable for business applications at least I can't really blame people for expecting Parallels and VMware to pivot their products to meet that need that was essentially what most people were using it in the first place for.

ubermonkey 5y ago
I mean, I've definitely met a number of folks who just assumed that running x86 Windows on M1 would work just the same as running it on an Intel Mac. As you note, emulation products existed prior to the Intel switch, and they would do in a pinch, but they were VERY slow because emulation != virtualization. Doing anything complex in an emulated environment was PAINFUL. Running Windows in a Parallels or VMWare virtual machine on my Intel Mac works VERY well, but no emulation product will deliver that level of performance. You could of course virtualize ARM Windows on an M1, I suppose, but then you're not in an Intel environment, and the ARM Windows software landscape is thin.

MisterTea 5y ago

Modern "programmers" don't know how computer work. Film at 11.

jlokier 5y ago

Virtualization isn't emulation, but emulation can be used for the same effect, to run VM images. That's where VMware started: The original VMware product started the whole x86 VM field before Intel provided any virtualization capabilities. VMware's first product, able to run Windows VMs smoothly in a window, was amazing compared to what had come before, and they did it before there were any x86 features for virtualization, using clever code scanning and emulation techniques. It's not at all obvious that they couldn't use similar clever techniques again, combined with Rosetta 2 style JIT - if they wanted to.