27 ms·

UTM – Virtual Machines for iOS and macOS

342 points by eiiot 3y ago

outcoldman 3y ago
What I don't like about Parallels and VMWare, is that they push all of those integrations between OS, like openings Windows from Windows in macOS. Or opening some documents from macOS right in Windows. I prefer to have VM isolated from my main macOS. So it is always going through all configurations and trying to figure out what I need to turn off.
- TimTheTinker 3y ago
  Parallels has a single option in the Security settings tab: "Isolate VM from macOS". It disables all cross-machine integrations.
- mavamaarten 3y ago
  I have flashbacks from when I had parallels installed, and it would constantly try to open any file I double clicked with Notepad on Windows.
CharlesW 3y ago
This is a great reminder for me to get off the Parallels "Give me $70 every year for absolutely nothing" train. Thank you @eliot! Has anyone found a reasonably painless way to migrate their disk images from Parallels to UTM?
- TimTheTinker 3y ago
  > absolutely nothing They do release new versions that maintain compatibility with the latest versions of macOS, and Parallels Tools updates that maintain compatibility with the latest versions of Windows and Linux. So not nothing... but I agree $70/year is a bit much for maintenance updates.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > Has anyone found a reasonably painless way to migrate their disk images from Parallels to UTM? These instructions may do the trick: https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/4927#issuecomment-1629441741 https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/4927#issuecomment-16294...
_silicon 3y ago
Too bad jit isn’t working on iOS 17 because of the new personalized developer disk images for debugging.
t8sr 3y ago
I can't say enough nice things about UTM. Especially if you've ever tried using QEMU manually, you'll appreciate how much heavy lifting UTM is doing for you. (It's basically impossible to run QEMU "correctly" on macOS. It randomly crashes, issues non-existent instructions, or freezes in IO for seconds at a time, all of which are problems UTM doesn't have.) Yes, I imagine there are fancier commercial VMs out there, but UTM is free and open source, and it works great. (I'm not a light user, either, I use it for Linux kernel work, and never had any cause to complain.)
newaccount74 3y ago
I wish Apple would drop the 2 VM limit for virtualized macOS. UTM is really nice for running Xcode as a build server, but being limited to two VMs sucks. I build lots of software with old macOS versions because I still support macOS versions that Apple no longer supports.
- Alupis 3y ago
  It's amazing the level of abuse the average Apple developer tolerates. There's money to be made on Apple's platforms, to be sure, but putting up with nonsense like VM limits and what-not is insanity. I remember a time when it was against the EULA to virtualize OSX at all. Finally, perhaps a decade late, Apple grants virtualization to the commoners and people rejoiced - Stockholm Syndrome-esque. Apple gets away with this not just because people accept it, they welcome it. Meanwhile, most other platforms bend over backwards to make development easy.
  - Terretta 3y ago
    It's as if Apple's purpose is a "don't make me think" level of end user experience and trust, and their assumption is engineers will need to invest extra effort to enable that priority. It's not just Apple. Developer-experience focused web frameworks make one time creation easier, at the expense of users who run it every time. The priority is upside down. Thankfully, for hardware, wallet-share shows there's money to be made from giving users a curated experience at the cost of nominal incremental developer effort. And the resurgence of SSR (new old hotness?) shows the same can hold true on the tech stack.
    - Alupis 3y ago
      It's not mutually exclusive though. A developer can be allowed to spin up N vm's and Apple can still provide an amazing end-user experience. It's just a EULA thing... there's no technical reason. It's "just because".
      - newaccount74 3y ago
COMMENT___ 3y ago
Besides running Windows 11 VM, I use UTM to run Windows 98 on ARM-based MacBook. Great for playing old games on modern Mac devices.
dfabulich 3y ago
The biggest problem with UTM is that it works great for some people, and works terribly for others. Seriously, scroll up and down on the threads here on this page, and you'll see a bunch of people saying "I wish I could use UTM, but it doesn't work / is unusably slow" and a bunch of people replying "weird, it works great for me." My experience: UTM has literally never worked for me. I just tried to do a bog standard Ubuntu ARM install on my M1 2021 Mac, following the guide here https://docs.getutm.app/guides/ubuntu/ https://docs.getutm.app/guides/ubuntu/ and it failed. I'm staring at a blinking cursor on a black screen. Sadly, the people for whom it works great can't really provide any useful technical support for the people for whom it doesn't work. I even paid $10 for UTM on the Mac App Store, like a sucker, hoping that I could get some tech support that way, but the only tech support channel is their Discord, which is full of randos saying "lol, works for me, skill issue." My recommendation: Give UTM a try! Either you'll love it, and save a bunch of money, or it won't work at all, like me, and you'll just have to pay $100/year for Parallels. Parallels is probably gonna just work. If Parallels doesn't work for you, you can reach out to them and talk to a person who can help, because they want you to keep paying to renew your Parallels license. They're incentivized to help you succeed.
- ofrzeta 3y ago
  There's also Virtualbox.
- JuanPosadas 3y ago
  > Sadly, the people for whom it works great can't really provide any useful technical support for the people for whom it doesn't work. I tried the latest debian (downloaded it off their website) and have had no issues, aside from one bizarre one. If you set your boot VM above a specific size, not even a large one, I mean like 30GB to 100GB (I forgot how much) then your VM boots really slow. And if you set it large enough, your VM will never boot. Adding a second drive of any size will not trigger this bug at all.
JaggerJo 3y ago
Used this to create a Debian VM on my M2 Mac mini. Works great.
- walthamstow 3y ago
  With a desktop env? I have only been able to get terminal environments working on my M1 MBP
  - hrrsn 3y ago
    Yes, the process is the same as any other Linux desktop environment. There are a bunch of VM images you can download at https://mac.getutm.app/gallery/ https://mac.getutm.app/gallery/
- sneak 3y ago
  What settings are you using to get 3d acceleration working with full panel resolution? I've tried dozens of settings/image combinations trying to get this to "work great" and have failed.
JodieBenitez 3y ago
Someone pointed me to Lima which is a bit like wsl2 for macos: https://lima-vm.io https://lima-vm.io Not sure what is used underneath but it worked great for me.
- lloeki 3y ago
  Either QEMU or Virtualization.framework, pickable on vm creation. colima is a layer upon lima that sets up a VM the easy way docker-machine/boot2docker style.
jahnu 3y ago
Great project. Just hoping for command line attach/detach of USB devices and we can use it in our CI setup for some stuff.
markuta 3y ago
I’ve been using it to run Kali Linux ARM edition for the Pen-200 course. And it works really well, everything just feels snappy. My only grape is the scaling and hi-res screens is less refined than for example vm-guest tools from VMware. But these can be fixed from the guest vm itself.
rcarmo 3y ago
If only this was on the iOS App Store…
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- noduerme 3y ago
  yes, I'm confused... what's new or interesting in this post? People have been using UTM for years.
  - xen2xen1 3y ago
    Poster seems? to be a dev interested in Macs. So probably boosting a favorite tool.
- chaxor 3y ago
  Why? I haven't ever used the iOS store, but having a git repo should befar better as an option so you can verify that it is made properly, and not infected with a little extra tracking and such whenever it's added to the iOS store.
  - latexr 3y ago
    By not being on the App Store, it becomes a significant hassle to get it running. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37334977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37334977
  - TheDong 3y ago
    a git repo isn't that useful if you have to buy a $1000 device to build it. There's plenty of people with iOS devices, but only linux laptop and desktop computers.
    - dwaite 3y ago
      My understanding is that JIT support for faster emulation requires a developer debugging-related entitlement which is not available in distributed apps.
Kelteseth 3y ago
Can't wait for Apple to enable side loading so my iPad will become useful one day with this.
- Pesthuf 3y ago
  Even then you won't be able to get good performance without jailbreak because Apple makes doesn't let any third party app use JIT.
  - vimy 3y ago
    That’s the whole point of the third party app stores that are coming next year. Apple will only be able to control apps on their app store.
- vuln 3y ago
  My iPad Pro is a pro consumption device. I want a productivity device. :(
npad 3y ago
If you're running VMs on Mac for a development environment what you want is OrbStack: https://orbstack.dev/ https://orbstack.dev/
- kungfufrog 3y ago
  Can second this, been loving it since I switched, has been great. VMs and Docker in one!
  - avhception 3y ago
    Looks really interesting, I will try to see whether we can benefit from it in our web-dev environments!
  - kdrag0n 3y ago
    Great to hear! Quick question for you actually: what's the value prop of having VMs and containers in one? I've been having a hard time with that from a marketing perspective.
    - kungfufrog 3y ago
      Less tools and software to keep up to date!
- kdrag0n 3y ago
  Thanks for mentioning OrbStack! Happy to answer questions as the dev.
  - orbmulti 3y ago
    Hey, I just switched from Linux to MacOS and I wondered how to best set up a work environment on MacOS. I don't really want to use brew as the sandboxing on MacOS seems to be much worse than I expected it to be e.g. as far as I see you can only prevent the access of $HOME/Desktop, $HOME/Documents and $HOME/Downloads. I found out that using Canonical Multipass allows you to easily set up ubuntu VMs and this I think it is a good way to create a working environment for development and of course by using it one can improve the sandboxing as everything is executed inside a vm. ------- Now to come to the point your OrbStack seems to be really similar to Canonical Multipass, so I wondered how they do they compare to each other? Why should I prefer to use OrbStack over Canonical Multipass (besides the possibility of being able to run other distributions than ubuntu)?
akerr 3y ago
I use this to run pi-hole on Debian on my old Mac mini which also hosts our network Time Machine.
alberth 3y ago
OpenBSD Anyone have tips on how to boot OpenBSD with UTM?
- whenlambo 3y ago
  What exactly is the problem? I had no problems booting FreeBSD. I don't think OpenBSD is any different.
  - alberth 3y ago
    You mind sharing the instruction guide to how you installed FreeBSD within UTM on Apple Silicon. OpenBSD won’t even initialize on UTM/AppleSilicon for me.
    - khrbtxyz 3y ago
      The FreeBSD qcow2 can be used directly without running an install. The one that I used was FreeBSD-13.2-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64.qcow2 For OpenBSD, the installer works after adjusting the devices in the guest. https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.3/arm64/install73.img https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.3/arm64/install73.img - UTM / Create New Virtual Machine / Virtualize / Other - Select 'Skip ISO boot' / Continue - Hardware / (adjust as needed) Continue - Storage / (adjust as needed) Continue - Shared Directory / Continue - Select 'Open VM Settings' / Save - Right-click on Devices/Display and select Remove - Devices / New / Serial - Drive / New / Import and select install73.img - Edit the VM again and move the second VirtIO Drive to the first position by right-clicking on it and selecting 'Move Up' If you feel inclined, hop on to the UTM Discord and the folks there (me included) should be able to help out.
em500 3y ago
I realize that "for iOS" comes from the github project blurb., but I think that it's pretty misleading. The iOS installation options are basically a jailbreak (impossible on recent CPU/iOS versions) or semi-tethering and re-loading/signing the app every few days. https://docs.getutm.app/installation/ios/#summary https://docs.getutm.app/installation/ios/#summary
- newaccount74 3y ago
  I can't wait to see how EU sideloading will work. I hope they do it properly.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  There's an app called reprosion that I've used in the past that can do the signing on your iOS device and even automate it. (I used it to load a semi-tethered jailbreak) The limit is 7 days. The app itself doesn't have to be reinstalled, just the signing cert. I am very excited for sideloading to get implemented in the EEA, since that'll make this much easier.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  > jailbreak (impossible on recent Just think about that. Apple has successfully made hardware that they can distribute to 1 billion+ people, many of whom have something to gain by jailbreaking, yet not a single person has managed it.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    This isn't because the software is secure, it's because nation-state actors outbid both Apple and the rest of the community for exclusive access to software vulnerabilities. New vulns often don't hit the jailbreak community for months or even years after the NSA has already used them to rifle through your shit. Furthermore, to achieve what the jailbreak community would consider a usable jailbreak, you need to string together several different vulnerabilities or bypasses into a single exploit chain. Nation-state actors will settle for just attacking iMessage directly, which gives them all your text messages, but is entirely useless for loading unsigned code or injecting tweaks into apps. To make matters worse, the UK is mulling a bill that would give them veto rights on security updates, specifically so that their old exploits would continue to work until they've bought new vulns.
vintagedave 3y ago
I used this a couple of weeks ago to install Windows 11 ARM on macOS (Ventura on a new M2), looking to replace Fusion. It was disappointing: * Integration tools like copy/paste between VM and host, or file sharing, didn't work * Graphics constantly glitched, often going to a grey screen. There seemed no way to recover, and I had to force restart the VM The drivers / assistant tools have a 2012 date on them. I'm aware it's a free product and I have no right to expect anything (and I don't; I went back to Fusion.) And perhaps the situation would improve if I or others financially supported the project, which seems a better response to issues :) Nevertheless I went in hoping I could replace the commercial VM solutions, which on Mac have required yearly updates that deliver almost no new value, with something open source -- and I can't yet.
- donatj 3y ago
  Copy paste definitely works. I go back and forth all day. Did you install the SPICE tools? https://docs.getutm.app/guest-support/windows/#windows-xp-and-higher https://docs.getutm.app/guest-support/windows/#windows-xp-an... I've also not seen any graphical errors, I'm not trying to play games though. I just use it for basic desktop apps.
  - vintagedave 3y ago
    I did install them. I noticed they had a 2012 date, which surprised me. Maybe the wrong ones are available?
- eppsilon 3y ago
  Do you have copy-paste and shared folders working in Fusion (with a Windows ARM VM)? Last I checked VMware Tools did not support those features yet. Edit: The Fusion 2023 Tech Preview [1] installs the full VMware Tools and supports copy-paste. 1. https://customerconnect.vmware.com/downloads/get-download?downloadGroup=FUS-TP2023 https://customerconnect.vmware.com/downloads/get-download?do...
- kim0 3y ago
  Maybe connecting through MS RDP tool would offer a better UX
tech5000 3y ago
I think what would be amazing would be if one day it is possible to run macOS on an Apple Silicon iPad. This seems like it would be something that many people would want, so I guess there are technical issues preventing this. In another thread, the absence of JIT support has been mentioned for example.
- mbreese 3y ago
  Memory is another issue. There isn’t much extra TAM on the iPad. I ran UTM in my iPad Pro once and crashed it when trying to use a VM with too much RAM.
fooblat 3y ago
I love UTM. It works great for my needs. I mostly develop infrastructure automation and configuration tooling and I run all my VMs in terminal mode. The wide availability of arm64 distros and OSes makes this easy. I also use it to run a tiny pi hole instance when I'm traveling.
- cosmojg 3y ago
  What's the advantage of spinning up an entire VM to run a local Pi Hole instance instead of just setting up a firewall or using a browser blocker like uBlock Origin? I was under the impression that spinning up a Pi Hole instance is really only necesary if you own devices which don't allow for such things, like smart TVs and other internet-connected appliances.
  - fooblat 3y ago
    This is not a case of one or the other. I do all of the above and more.
    - cosmojg 3y ago
      ...while you're traveling? Can you provide more details? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around your use case.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  > I also use it to run a tiny pi hole instance when I'm traveling. That's such a good idea. I used to run one using a raspberry pi, which got lost during the house move, so would love to do that. Is is better than running it via Docker, e.g. from the resource usage pov? Do you have any good resources/tutorial to share? PS. In pre-Apple Silicon times I used it to play with old versions of Windows, but now DosBox seems like a better choice for Win 3.11 or 95.
  - TimTheTinker 3y ago
    May I recommend a Dell Wyse thin client from eBay as a replacement for the rPi? They can be had for around $30, and they come with an 8GB onboard eMMC storage as well.
chkhd 3y ago
UTM is great, and once snapshot capability is added [1] it will become my default recommendation for sure. Until then sticking with Parallels. NOTE: An unofficial snapshot manager exists [2]. 1: https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/5484 https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/5484 2: https://github.com/Metamogul/UTM-Snapshot-Manager https://github.com/Metamogul/UTM-Snapshot-Manager
- plorkyeran 3y ago
  Hah, I was going to say that I've successfully faked a limited form of snapshots using clonefile, and then turns out that's what the implementation-in-progress is doing.
- princevegeta89 3y ago
  As someone who would always practice the habit of doing development within VMs as opposed to my actual system for a number of reasons, I tried UTM and played with it for a long time to host ARM64 Linux VMs on my M1 Macbook Pro, however the file sharing issues plagued me - with the most common problem being, having my shared folders disappear suddenly from the guest VMs, and having to do workarounds to get them back, quite often. Next, I tried VMWare Fusion, but it has the same problem. After that I tried Parallels, which seemed too expensive, so I jumped to Lima. I am glad to have found Lima - it also is based on QEMU and made bringing up linux VMs very easy and provided network sharing out of the box. Now all my development lies within these Lima VMs and I am happy to report I never had a problem. I know I could do display forwarding if needed but I am good with these headless instances for now (thanks to VSCode).
  - dingi 3y ago
    I've been using a similar setup for a while now. I just use SFTP for file sharing. Never bothered to try UTM's file sharing feature.
    - princevegeta89 3y ago
      While this is a good alternative, some tools like git clients and other things that I run on the host system can't be worked out via SFTP
jasoneckert 3y ago
UTM has been a solid hypervisor for me for the past 2 years, and it's received several great functionality and feature improvements over that time too. But perhaps my favourite aspect of UTM is that it stands for Universal Turing Machine (arguably the best name ever for a virtualization product).
Transpire7487 3y ago
UTM is great for basic stuff but performance has been abysmal so not really viable as a workhorse in my day to day. Nothing beats Parallels on Mac, worth every penny.
- bpoyner 3y ago
  If you're on apple silicon and the VM is x86, I agree the performance is abysmal. I'm pretty sure this is just a QEMU issue and not really the fault of UTM. If your VM is aarch64, the VM performance is amazingly great and I can't recommend UTM enough.
  - grav 3y ago
    I also experienced performance problems with Arch Linux ARM through UTM. Parallels seems to perform much better for me. One issue might be that only OpenGL 2.1 is supported: https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/4285 https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/4285
danwee 3y ago
It only lacks support to spin up/down multiple VMs via a simple configuration file (like Vagrant, for instance). If I want to spin up a small lab with N VMs with specific private IPs and the like, UTM is not the most dev-friendly tool. I think there's place for some tool in between UTM and QEMU.
phmqk76 3y ago
It’s impressive for what it is. But after noodling around with UTM and Fusion, I subscribed to Parallels, and it’s on a whole different level. I used it years and years ago to emulate x86 on PowerPC Macs, and it’s the gold standard. Night and day.
sam_goody 3y ago
Is there a way to use Vagrant with UTM?
- ansonhoyt 3y ago
  There's an open issue [1]. A scripting interface has since been added [2], and updated [3], so there's progress. [1] https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518 https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518 [2] https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518#issuecomment-1355830231 https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518#issuecomme... [3] https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518#issuecomment-1478607592 https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518#issuecomme...
l72 3y ago
Work issued me an M1 MacBook Pro, but all my development is under Linux. Linux has been my preferred environment since the late 90s. While I find the MacBook Pro hardware to be nice, I find macos clumsy and frustrating, and my productivity severely drops. So, I run Fedora (aarch64) under UTM full screen. It works acceptably well, and I often forget I'm on a mac. I just wish macos would get out of the way, and not sometimes knock you out of full screen mode.
- bandergirl 3y ago
  What’s stopping you from dual booting it?
  - cosmojg 3y ago
    In my case, their MDM software of choice doesn't run on Linux.
  - l72 3y ago
    As Asahi stabilizes (especially with their new Fedora remix), that is my plan.
  - SamuelAdams 3y ago
    Currently using Ashai on Arch Linux. The lack of Thunderbolt support is a deal breaker, as I need to use external monitors for work. Still excited to see progress but I’m probably not going to be able to use Linux on a Mac for another 12 months.
  - ukuina 3y ago
    You can't dual-boot on Apple Silicon Macs, outside of the experimental Asahi Linux.
- petesergeant 3y ago
  How much of a performance hit would you estimate you take from doing that? Seems like a nice solution if not too much
  - 3y ago
c-hendricks 3y ago
Two things I love about UTM: - The serial window. - The ability to truly lock the mouse to the window. I wanted to use it on my work provided machine, but when hooked up to my monitor, the performance was lacking (21:9, 1440p). Performance also felt the same across an M1 MacBook Air, an M2 MacBook Air, and an M2 MacBook Pro, so it felt like something was up, not that the machine just couldn't handle it. Sadly, Parallels was the only thing I tried that performed well when connected to that monitor.
- Damogran6 3y ago
  Shooting from the hip, all of those CPUs have very similar single core performance...the more expensive chips scale out, rather than up. (yeah, there's a single core speed improvement across generations, it's just not earth-shattering)
- _y5hn 3y ago
  Running Manjaro-i3 minimal edition quite well apart from expected lacks. But I don't need 3d accelleration.
mschuster91 3y ago
Since this is essentially QEMU: does anyone here have a working build of the QEMU guest utilities for Windows? No matter what one tries, they're all severely broken. Or alternatively, anything that can run Windows 7 x32 on an Apple Silicon machine. (Why? Because I need to run Samsung ODIN, which is windows-only)
protoman3000 3y ago
Doesn’t have hypervisor on non-jailbroken iOS devices. It’s really a shame, otherwise I’d had my Linux iPad dream device.
samhuk 3y ago
I used UTM extensively when creating an almost-no-touch tool for developers to setup their Macbook devices at the company I work for. There's really no other convenient way to do this. It was awesome to be able to run the tool on a fresh MacOS install, test the effects, make some changes, then do it all over again with little fuss. Thanks UTM!

342 points by eiiot 3y ago

What I don't like about Parallels and VMWare, is that they push all of those integrations between OS, like openings Windows from Windows in macOS. Or opening some documents from macOS right in Windows. I prefer to have VM isolated from my main macOS. So it is always going through all configurations and trying to figure out what I need to turn off.

TimTheTinker 3y ago
Parallels has a single option in the Security settings tab: "Isolate VM from macOS". It disables all cross-machine integrations.
mavamaarten 3y ago
I have flashbacks from when I had parallels installed, and it would constantly try to open any file I double clicked with Notepad on Windows.

CharlesW 3y ago

This is a great reminder for me to get off the Parallels "Give me $70 every year for absolutely nothing" train. Thank you @eliot! Has anyone found a reasonably painless way to migrate their disk images from Parallels to UTM?

TimTheTinker 3y ago
> absolutely nothing They do release new versions that maintain compatibility with the latest versions of macOS, and Parallels Tools updates that maintain compatibility with the latest versions of Windows and Linux. So not nothing... but I agree $70/year is a bit much for maintenance updates.
CharlesW 3y ago
> Has anyone found a reasonably painless way to migrate their disk images from Parallels to UTM? These instructions may do the trick: https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/4927#issuecomment-1629441741 https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/4927#issuecomment-16294...

_silicon 3y ago

Too bad jit isn’t working on iOS 17 because of the new personalized developer disk images for debugging.

t8sr 3y ago

I can't say enough nice things about UTM. Especially if you've ever tried using QEMU manually, you'll appreciate how much heavy lifting UTM is doing for you. (It's basically impossible to run QEMU "correctly" on macOS. It randomly crashes, issues non-existent instructions, or freezes in IO for seconds at a time, all of which are problems UTM doesn't have.) Yes, I imagine there are fancier commercial VMs out there, but UTM is free and open source, and it works great. (I'm not a light user, either, I use it for Linux kernel work, and never had any cause to complain.)

newaccount74 3y ago

I wish Apple would drop the 2 VM limit for virtualized macOS. UTM is really nice for running Xcode as a build server, but being limited to two VMs sucks. I build lots of software with old macOS versions because I still support macOS versions that Apple no longer supports.

Alupis 3y ago
It's amazing the level of abuse the average Apple developer tolerates. There's money to be made on Apple's platforms, to be sure, but putting up with nonsense like VM limits and what-not is insanity. I remember a time when it was against the EULA to virtualize OSX at all. Finally, perhaps a decade late, Apple grants virtualization to the commoners and people rejoiced - Stockholm Syndrome-esque. Apple gets away with this not just because people accept it, they welcome it. Meanwhile, most other platforms bend over backwards to make development easy.
- Terretta 3y ago
  It's as if Apple's purpose is a "don't make me think" level of end user experience and trust, and their assumption is engineers will need to invest extra effort to enable that priority. It's not just Apple. Developer-experience focused web frameworks make one time creation easier, at the expense of users who run it every time. The priority is upside down. Thankfully, for hardware, wallet-share shows there's money to be made from giving users a curated experience at the cost of nominal incremental developer effort. And the resurgence of SSR (new old hotness?) shows the same can hold true on the tech stack.
  - Alupis 3y ago
    It's not mutually exclusive though. A developer can be allowed to spin up N vm's and Apple can still provide an amazing end-user experience. It's just a EULA thing... there's no technical reason. It's "just because".
    - newaccount74 3y ago

COMMENT___ 3y ago

Besides running Windows 11 VM, I use UTM to run Windows 98 on ARM-based MacBook. Great for playing old games on modern Mac devices.

dfabulich 3y ago

The biggest problem with UTM is that it works great for some people, and works terribly for others. Seriously, scroll up and down on the threads here on this page, and you'll see a bunch of people saying "I wish I could use UTM, but it doesn't work / is unusably slow" and a bunch of people replying "weird, it works great for me." My experience: UTM has literally never worked for me. I just tried to do a bog standard Ubuntu ARM install on my M1 2021 Mac, following the guide here https://docs.getutm.app/guides/ubuntu/ https://docs.getutm.app/guides/ubuntu/ and it failed. I'm staring at a blinking cursor on a black screen. Sadly, the people for whom it works great can't really provide any useful technical support for the people for whom it doesn't work. I even paid $10 for UTM on the Mac App Store, like a sucker, hoping that I could get some tech support that way, but the only tech support channel is their Discord, which is full of randos saying "lol, works for me, skill issue." My recommendation: Give UTM a try! Either you'll love it, and save a bunch of money, or it won't work at all, like me, and you'll just have to pay $100/year for Parallels. Parallels is probably gonna just work. If Parallels doesn't work for you, you can reach out to them and talk to a person who can help, because they want you to keep paying to renew your Parallels license. They're incentivized to help you succeed.

ofrzeta 3y ago
There's also Virtualbox.
JuanPosadas 3y ago
> Sadly, the people for whom it works great can't really provide any useful technical support for the people for whom it doesn't work. I tried the latest debian (downloaded it off their website) and have had no issues, aside from one bizarre one. If you set your boot VM above a specific size, not even a large one, I mean like 30GB to 100GB (I forgot how much) then your VM boots really slow. And if you set it large enough, your VM will never boot. Adding a second drive of any size will not trigger this bug at all.

JaggerJo 3y ago

Used this to create a Debian VM on my M2 Mac mini. Works great.

walthamstow 3y ago
With a desktop env? I have only been able to get terminal environments working on my M1 MBP
- hrrsn 3y ago
  Yes, the process is the same as any other Linux desktop environment. There are a bunch of VM images you can download at https://mac.getutm.app/gallery/ https://mac.getutm.app/gallery/
sneak 3y ago
What settings are you using to get 3d acceleration working with full panel resolution? I've tried dozens of settings/image combinations trying to get this to "work great" and have failed.

JodieBenitez 3y ago

Someone pointed me to Lima which is a bit like wsl2 for macos: https://lima-vm.io https://lima-vm.io Not sure what is used underneath but it worked great for me.

lloeki 3y ago
Either QEMU or Virtualization.framework, pickable on vm creation. colima is a layer upon lima that sets up a VM the easy way docker-machine/boot2docker style.

jahnu 3y ago

Great project. Just hoping for command line attach/detach of USB devices and we can use it in our CI setup for some stuff.

markuta 3y ago

I’ve been using it to run Kali Linux ARM edition for the Pen-200 course. And it works really well, everything just feels snappy. My only grape is the scaling and hi-res screens is less refined than for example vm-guest tools from VMware. But these can be fixed from the guest vm itself.

rcarmo 3y ago

If only this was on the iOS App Store…

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
noduerme 3y ago
yes, I'm confused... what's new or interesting in this post? People have been using UTM for years.
- xen2xen1 3y ago
  Poster seems? to be a dev interested in Macs. So probably boosting a favorite tool.
chaxor 3y ago
Why? I haven't ever used the iOS store, but having a git repo should befar better as an option so you can verify that it is made properly, and not infected with a little extra tracking and such whenever it's added to the iOS store.
- latexr 3y ago
  By not being on the App Store, it becomes a significant hassle to get it running. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37334977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37334977
- TheDong 3y ago
  a git repo isn't that useful if you have to buy a $1000 device to build it. There's plenty of people with iOS devices, but only linux laptop and desktop computers.
  - dwaite 3y ago
    My understanding is that JIT support for faster emulation requires a developer debugging-related entitlement which is not available in distributed apps.

Kelteseth 3y ago

Can't wait for Apple to enable side loading so my iPad will become useful one day with this.

Pesthuf 3y ago
Even then you won't be able to get good performance without jailbreak because Apple makes doesn't let any third party app use JIT.
- vimy 3y ago
  That’s the whole point of the third party app stores that are coming next year. Apple will only be able to control apps on their app store.
vuln 3y ago
My iPad Pro is a pro consumption device. I want a productivity device. :(

npad 3y ago

If you're running VMs on Mac for a development environment what you want is OrbStack: https://orbstack.dev/ https://orbstack.dev/

kungfufrog 3y ago
Can second this, been loving it since I switched, has been great. VMs and Docker in one!
- avhception 3y ago
  Looks really interesting, I will try to see whether we can benefit from it in our web-dev environments!
- kdrag0n 3y ago
  Great to hear! Quick question for you actually: what's the value prop of having VMs and containers in one? I've been having a hard time with that from a marketing perspective.
  - kungfufrog 3y ago
    Less tools and software to keep up to date!
kdrag0n 3y ago
Thanks for mentioning OrbStack! Happy to answer questions as the dev.
- orbmulti 3y ago
  Hey, I just switched from Linux to MacOS and I wondered how to best set up a work environment on MacOS. I don't really want to use brew as the sandboxing on MacOS seems to be much worse than I expected it to be e.g. as far as I see you can only prevent the access of $HOME/Desktop, $HOME/Documents and $HOME/Downloads. I found out that using Canonical Multipass allows you to easily set up ubuntu VMs and this I think it is a good way to create a working environment for development and of course by using it one can improve the sandboxing as everything is executed inside a vm. ------- Now to come to the point your OrbStack seems to be really similar to Canonical Multipass, so I wondered how they do they compare to each other? Why should I prefer to use OrbStack over Canonical Multipass (besides the possibility of being able to run other distributions than ubuntu)?

akerr 3y ago

I use this to run pi-hole on Debian on my old Mac mini which also hosts our network Time Machine.

alberth 3y ago

OpenBSD Anyone have tips on how to boot OpenBSD with UTM?

whenlambo 3y ago
What exactly is the problem? I had no problems booting FreeBSD. I don't think OpenBSD is any different.
- alberth 3y ago
  You mind sharing the instruction guide to how you installed FreeBSD within UTM on Apple Silicon. OpenBSD won’t even initialize on UTM/AppleSilicon for me.
  - khrbtxyz 3y ago
    The FreeBSD qcow2 can be used directly without running an install. The one that I used was FreeBSD-13.2-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64.qcow2 For OpenBSD, the installer works after adjusting the devices in the guest. https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.3/arm64/install73.img https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.3/arm64/install73.img - UTM / Create New Virtual Machine / Virtualize / Other - Select 'Skip ISO boot' / Continue - Hardware / (adjust as needed) Continue - Storage / (adjust as needed) Continue - Shared Directory / Continue - Select 'Open VM Settings' / Save - Right-click on Devices/Display and select Remove - Devices / New / Serial - Drive / New / Import and select install73.img - Edit the VM again and move the second VirtIO Drive to the first position by right-clicking on it and selecting 'Move Up' If you feel inclined, hop on to the UTM Discord and the folks there (me included) should be able to help out.

em500 3y ago

I realize that "for iOS" comes from the github project blurb., but I think that it's pretty misleading. The iOS installation options are basically a jailbreak (impossible on recent CPU/iOS versions) or semi-tethering and re-loading/signing the app every few days. https://docs.getutm.app/installation/ios/#summary https://docs.getutm.app/installation/ios/#summary

newaccount74 3y ago
I can't wait to see how EU sideloading will work. I hope they do it properly.
extraduder_ire 3y ago
There's an app called reprosion that I've used in the past that can do the signing on your iOS device and even automate it. (I used it to load a semi-tethered jailbreak) The limit is 7 days. The app itself doesn't have to be reinstalled, just the signing cert. I am very excited for sideloading to get implemented in the EEA, since that'll make this much easier.
londons_explore 3y ago
> jailbreak (impossible on recent Just think about that. Apple has successfully made hardware that they can distribute to 1 billion+ people, many of whom have something to gain by jailbreaking, yet not a single person has managed it.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  This isn't because the software is secure, it's because nation-state actors outbid both Apple and the rest of the community for exclusive access to software vulnerabilities. New vulns often don't hit the jailbreak community for months or even years after the NSA has already used them to rifle through your shit. Furthermore, to achieve what the jailbreak community would consider a usable jailbreak, you need to string together several different vulnerabilities or bypasses into a single exploit chain. Nation-state actors will settle for just attacking iMessage directly, which gives them all your text messages, but is entirely useless for loading unsigned code or injecting tweaks into apps. To make matters worse, the UK is mulling a bill that would give them veto rights on security updates, specifically so that their old exploits would continue to work until they've bought new vulns.

vintagedave 3y ago

I used this a couple of weeks ago to install Windows 11 ARM on macOS (Ventura on a new M2), looking to replace Fusion. It was disappointing: * Integration tools like copy/paste between VM and host, or file sharing, didn't work * Graphics constantly glitched, often going to a grey screen. There seemed no way to recover, and I had to force restart the VM The drivers / assistant tools have a 2012 date on them. I'm aware it's a free product and I have no right to expect anything (and I don't; I went back to Fusion.) And perhaps the situation would improve if I or others financially supported the project, which seems a better response to issues :) Nevertheless I went in hoping I could replace the commercial VM solutions, which on Mac have required yearly updates that deliver almost no new value, with something open source -- and I can't yet.

donatj 3y ago
Copy paste definitely works. I go back and forth all day. Did you install the SPICE tools? https://docs.getutm.app/guest-support/windows/#windows-xp-and-higher https://docs.getutm.app/guest-support/windows/#windows-xp-an... I've also not seen any graphical errors, I'm not trying to play games though. I just use it for basic desktop apps.
- vintagedave 3y ago
  I did install them. I noticed they had a 2012 date, which surprised me. Maybe the wrong ones are available?
eppsilon 3y ago
Do you have copy-paste and shared folders working in Fusion (with a Windows ARM VM)? Last I checked VMware Tools did not support those features yet. Edit: The Fusion 2023 Tech Preview [1] installs the full VMware Tools and supports copy-paste. 1. https://customerconnect.vmware.com/downloads/get-download?downloadGroup=FUS-TP2023 https://customerconnect.vmware.com/downloads/get-download?do...
kim0 3y ago
Maybe connecting through MS RDP tool would offer a better UX

tech5000 3y ago

I think what would be amazing would be if one day it is possible to run macOS on an Apple Silicon iPad. This seems like it would be something that many people would want, so I guess there are technical issues preventing this. In another thread, the absence of JIT support has been mentioned for example.

mbreese 3y ago
Memory is another issue. There isn’t much extra TAM on the iPad. I ran UTM in my iPad Pro once and crashed it when trying to use a VM with too much RAM.

fooblat 3y ago

I love UTM. It works great for my needs. I mostly develop infrastructure automation and configuration tooling and I run all my VMs in terminal mode. The wide availability of arm64 distros and OSes makes this easy. I also use it to run a tiny pi hole instance when I'm traveling.

cosmojg 3y ago
What's the advantage of spinning up an entire VM to run a local Pi Hole instance instead of just setting up a firewall or using a browser blocker like uBlock Origin? I was under the impression that spinning up a Pi Hole instance is really only necesary if you own devices which don't allow for such things, like smart TVs and other internet-connected appliances.
- fooblat 3y ago
  This is not a case of one or the other. I do all of the above and more.
  - cosmojg 3y ago
    ...while you're traveling? Can you provide more details? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around your use case.
rpastuszak 3y ago
> I also use it to run a tiny pi hole instance when I'm traveling. That's such a good idea. I used to run one using a raspberry pi, which got lost during the house move, so would love to do that. Is is better than running it via Docker, e.g. from the resource usage pov? Do you have any good resources/tutorial to share? PS. In pre-Apple Silicon times I used it to play with old versions of Windows, but now DosBox seems like a better choice for Win 3.11 or 95.
- TimTheTinker 3y ago
  May I recommend a Dell Wyse thin client from eBay as a replacement for the rPi? They can be had for around $30, and they come with an 8GB onboard eMMC storage as well.

chkhd 3y ago

UTM is great, and once snapshot capability is added [1] it will become my default recommendation for sure. Until then sticking with Parallels. NOTE: An unofficial snapshot manager exists [2]. 1: https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/5484 https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/5484 2: https://github.com/Metamogul/UTM-Snapshot-Manager https://github.com/Metamogul/UTM-Snapshot-Manager

plorkyeran 3y ago
Hah, I was going to say that I've successfully faked a limited form of snapshots using clonefile, and then turns out that's what the implementation-in-progress is doing.
princevegeta89 3y ago
As someone who would always practice the habit of doing development within VMs as opposed to my actual system for a number of reasons, I tried UTM and played with it for a long time to host ARM64 Linux VMs on my M1 Macbook Pro, however the file sharing issues plagued me - with the most common problem being, having my shared folders disappear suddenly from the guest VMs, and having to do workarounds to get them back, quite often. Next, I tried VMWare Fusion, but it has the same problem. After that I tried Parallels, which seemed too expensive, so I jumped to Lima. I am glad to have found Lima - it also is based on QEMU and made bringing up linux VMs very easy and provided network sharing out of the box. Now all my development lies within these Lima VMs and I am happy to report I never had a problem. I know I could do display forwarding if needed but I am good with these headless instances for now (thanks to VSCode).
- dingi 3y ago
  I've been using a similar setup for a while now. I just use SFTP for file sharing. Never bothered to try UTM's file sharing feature.
  - princevegeta89 3y ago
    While this is a good alternative, some tools like git clients and other things that I run on the host system can't be worked out via SFTP

jasoneckert 3y ago

UTM has been a solid hypervisor for me for the past 2 years, and it's received several great functionality and feature improvements over that time too. But perhaps my favourite aspect of UTM is that it stands for Universal Turing Machine (arguably the best name ever for a virtualization product).

Transpire7487 3y ago

UTM is great for basic stuff but performance has been abysmal so not really viable as a workhorse in my day to day. Nothing beats Parallels on Mac, worth every penny.

bpoyner 3y ago
If you're on apple silicon and the VM is x86, I agree the performance is abysmal. I'm pretty sure this is just a QEMU issue and not really the fault of UTM. If your VM is aarch64, the VM performance is amazingly great and I can't recommend UTM enough.
- grav 3y ago
  I also experienced performance problems with Arch Linux ARM through UTM. Parallels seems to perform much better for me. One issue might be that only OpenGL 2.1 is supported: https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/4285 https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/4285

danwee 3y ago

It only lacks support to spin up/down multiple VMs via a simple configuration file (like Vagrant, for instance). If I want to spin up a small lab with N VMs with specific private IPs and the like, UTM is not the most dev-friendly tool. I think there's place for some tool in between UTM and QEMU.

phmqk76 3y ago

It’s impressive for what it is. But after noodling around with UTM and Fusion, I subscribed to Parallels, and it’s on a whole different level. I used it years and years ago to emulate x86 on PowerPC Macs, and it’s the gold standard. Night and day.

sam_goody 3y ago

Is there a way to use Vagrant with UTM?

ansonhoyt 3y ago
There's an open issue [1]. A scripting interface has since been added [2], and updated [3], so there's progress. [1] https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518 https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518 [2] https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518#issuecomment-1355830231 https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518#issuecomme... [3] https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518#issuecomment-1478607592 https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518#issuecomme...

l72 3y ago

Work issued me an M1 MacBook Pro, but all my development is under Linux. Linux has been my preferred environment since the late 90s. While I find the MacBook Pro hardware to be nice, I find macos clumsy and frustrating, and my productivity severely drops. So, I run Fedora (aarch64) under UTM full screen. It works acceptably well, and I often forget I'm on a mac. I just wish macos would get out of the way, and not sometimes knock you out of full screen mode.

bandergirl 3y ago
What’s stopping you from dual booting it?
- cosmojg 3y ago
  In my case, their MDM software of choice doesn't run on Linux.
- l72 3y ago
  As Asahi stabilizes (especially with their new Fedora remix), that is my plan.
- SamuelAdams 3y ago
  Currently using Ashai on Arch Linux. The lack of Thunderbolt support is a deal breaker, as I need to use external monitors for work. Still excited to see progress but I’m probably not going to be able to use Linux on a Mac for another 12 months.
- ukuina 3y ago
  You can't dual-boot on Apple Silicon Macs, outside of the experimental Asahi Linux.
petesergeant 3y ago
How much of a performance hit would you estimate you take from doing that? Seems like a nice solution if not too much
- 3y ago

c-hendricks 3y ago

Two things I love about UTM: - The serial window. - The ability to truly lock the mouse to the window. I wanted to use it on my work provided machine, but when hooked up to my monitor, the performance was lacking (21:9, 1440p). Performance also felt the same across an M1 MacBook Air, an M2 MacBook Air, and an M2 MacBook Pro, so it felt like something was up, not that the machine just couldn't handle it. Sadly, Parallels was the only thing I tried that performed well when connected to that monitor.

Damogran6 3y ago
Shooting from the hip, all of those CPUs have very similar single core performance...the more expensive chips scale out, rather than up. (yeah, there's a single core speed improvement across generations, it's just not earth-shattering)
_y5hn 3y ago
Running Manjaro-i3 minimal edition quite well apart from expected lacks. But I don't need 3d accelleration.

mschuster91 3y ago

Since this is essentially QEMU: does anyone here have a working build of the QEMU guest utilities for Windows? No matter what one tries, they're all severely broken. Or alternatively, anything that can run Windows 7 x32 on an Apple Silicon machine. (Why? Because I need to run Samsung ODIN, which is windows-only)

protoman3000 3y ago

Doesn’t have hypervisor on non-jailbroken iOS devices. It’s really a shame, otherwise I’d had my Linux iPad dream device.

samhuk 3y ago

I used UTM extensively when creating an almost-no-touch tool for developers to setup their Macbook devices at the company I work for. There's really no other convenient way to do this. It was awesome to be able to run the tool on a fresh MacOS install, test the effects, make some changes, then do it all over again with little fuss. Thanks UTM!