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> The issue is that of course Apple computers that are large enough to run VMs are… expensive. Expensive compared to what? UTM uses Apple Virtualization Framew
by runeks 2y ago
> The issue is that of course Apple computers that are large enough to run VMs are… expensive.
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.
- dijit 2y agoHow can I verify that? it definitely looks in htop and Activity Monitor that the RAM is occupied and unavailable. Maybe memory compression helps, but it doesn’t appear so to me right now.
- runeks 2y ago> How can I verify that? Good question. I was speaking from memory, and all I can find when googling is this: https://docs.getutm.app/settings-apple/virtualization/#balloon-device https://docs.getutm.app/settings-apple/virtualization/#ballo... EDIT: I recall vaguely something about it being a problem with Linux guest VMs because it aggressively uses RAM as a file system cache. So it'll just fill up RAM to the max when reading from disk, and overwrite this if it's later needed by applications.
- dijit 1y agoballoon memory is supported by qemu on linux too.
- drob518 2y agoThe cost of RAM on Apple machines is far above the market price for the same RAM in the PC world. Apple quotes a loss leader with a minimum configuration, but as soon as you up the specs to something usable by a developer for VMs or LLMs, the price has ballooned.