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I do believe most of the current VMM apps - Virtualbox, Parallels, VMWare - that run on Intel Mac do offer their own custom hypervisor solution mostly tapping o

I do believe most of the current VMM apps - Virtualbox, Parallels, VMWare - that run on Intel Mac do offer their own custom hypervisor solution mostly tapping on to "Intel Virtualization solution" ( https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/virtualization/virtualization-technology/intel-virtualization-technology.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/virtualization/virtu... ) through kernel extensions and / or the macOS hypervisor framework (which I think avoids kernel extension). This is possible because Intel is more "open" and readily shares their hardware literature / SDKs with developers and that is why we have had many custom, decent and performant hypervisor solution on Intel Macs. But Apple has been loathe to release similar literature for their ARM SoCs because they don't want independent competitive alternatives to their system softwares (which is ok up to a point to protect their business, but not if it crosses into illegal anti-competitive behaviour). Apple has great developers and they can surely build a decent hypervisor API solution. But we'll never know if it is the best if no custom alternates are allowed (either due to lack of hardware literature or due to Apple policies restricting such custom alternatives).

dwaite 4y ago
> This is possible because Intel is more "open" and readily shares their hardware literature / SDKs with developers and that is why we have had many custom, decent and performant hypervisor solution on Intel Macs. But Apple has been loathe to release similar literature for their ARM SoCs because they don't want independent competitive alternatives to their system softwares. Are you looking for https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100942/0100/AArch64-virtualization https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100942/0100/AArch64-... ? Access to virtualization features is provided through the hypervisor framework for both intel and apple silicon products. If you have an existing Intel architecture product you might be upset that Apple is going to disable your ability to use virtualization directly via a kext. But, I have a hard time imagining someone really wanting to use their own hand crafted hypervisor rather than the one Apple built on Apple Silicon for running on Apple operating systems - especially since Apple has committed to providing additional hard things like paravirtualized hardware.
- saagarjha 4y ago
  There are reasons one might want to do this; for example Apple does not provide access to all hardware performance counters in the guests they set up. This can be important for certain usecases. That said, beyond this there aren't really any good reasons why you should eschew Apple's solution, so once (if?) this is fixed the existing solutions should be pretty solid.

dwaite 4y ago

> This is possible because Intel is more "open" and readily shares their hardware literature / SDKs with developers and that is why we have had many custom, decent and performant hypervisor solution on Intel Macs. But Apple has been loathe to release similar literature for their ARM SoCs because they don't want independent competitive alternatives to their system softwares. Are you looking for https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100942/0100/AArch64-virtualization https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100942/0100/AArch64-... ? Access to virtualization features is provided through the hypervisor framework for both intel and apple silicon products. If you have an existing Intel architecture product you might be upset that Apple is going to disable your ability to use virtualization directly via a kext. But, I have a hard time imagining someone really wanting to use their own hand crafted hypervisor rather than the one Apple built on Apple Silicon for running on Apple operating systems - especially since Apple has committed to providing additional hard things like paravirtualized hardware.

saagarjha 4y ago
There are reasons one might want to do this; for example Apple does not provide access to all hardware performance counters in the guests they set up. This can be important for certain usecases. That said, beyond this there aren't really any good reasons why you should eschew Apple's solution, so once (if?) this is fixed the existing solutions should be pretty solid.