It is an Apple problem. Virtualization has been solved for good, even the cheapest consumer hardware has virtualization support since at least a decade by now and I sometimes run virtual machines on a 4GB netbook with an Atom processor just for fun.
I am running 100% automatically deployed/configured Debian desktops on Apple hardware for several years now, Intel and M1 CPUs. (100% reproducible is another level and another story).
Right now and for most of the past years I am running VMWare Fusion, which works with the features I need as long as you don't update macOS immediately after a new major revision was released. (Apple messing up internal APIs nearly every time.)
Sometimes in the past I also used the QEMU version provided by macPorts, and the only issue I had was with my non English keyboard, if you use a US keyboard layout you shouldn't have any issues at all.
Still, I am surprised, you seem to imply that you need to provision a new VM because of trouble with TypeScript/VSCode? Not sure what you are doing, or what plugins in VSCode you are running, but that I have to provision an entirely new VM to solve such kind of problems never happened to me and I haven't heard about that in my environment (big company, quite a lot of VSCode and TypeScript users).
Yeah the thing is, when using vt-d/vt-x and the kernel-assisted virtualisation (kvm) what’s happening is that a virtualised cpu core is effectively a process on the host system, and it’s given essentially access to the real cpu for most instructions (at least for those that are safe to be executed) so you’re really getting no noticeable slowdown.
I/O is another area of focus. Some cpus and NICs support srv-io (i think that’s the name) which remove hops between the hardware and the guest os. If you have the necessary hardware you can of course delegate an entire pci-connected device to a virtual machine, or delegate a whole disk to it (see virtio).
But in general qemu-kvm is the fastest you can get, and the most featureful.
One fun thing is that you can use qemu-kvm to run amazon linux 2023 virtual machines on your laptop. I’m looking into running it on my proxmox virtualisation cluster at home for the lulz.
Virtualization is a solved problem. In fact, it's the virtualization of the IBM 1401 that was made available as an option on the IBM 360 systems that caused (or greatly contributed to) the Y2K problem a few decades back.
Because new architectures and instruction sets happened every few years, the expected lifespan of any program back in the 1950s-60s was expected to be less than a decade. Combined with the eye-watering price of memory back then, it made sense to save every possible bit of RAM. Those programs weren't expected to be alive anywhere near the year 2000, when many of their assumptions about dates would prove invalid.
You can emulate a 1401, System 360, PDP-11, VAX 11/780, IBM PC, or pretty much any mass produced computer more than 20 years old on your computer, or even on your smartphone. It'll run with almost perfect fidelity, except that it'll likely run way too fast for timing related things. (I'm looking at you, Turbo Pascal runtime)
The problem is that the whole virtualization situation was left as an afterthought in the Apple ecosystem, and it got worse during the Apple Silicon transition years.
Just now things are starting to catch up, but there's still a wide gap in features; Apple Virtualization Framework is still very limited. And a personal limitation I hit recently, no USB4/Thunderbolt passthrough anywhere, not in UTM (which uses AVF), not in VMWare either.
Also remember the final Apple Silicon version of VMWare supporting M1/M2 wasn't available until November 2022 (it was a tech preview before), while all the Broadcom situation was ensuing. And I think only as of 2024 it runs smoothly. So far it's still the most reliable for desktop Linux VMs for me. Windows 11 for ARM runs very well too, and it does x86 emulation transparently, even 2010s games run well.
The uncomfortable reason is, despite WWDC hooplah and ostensible dev support, Apple looks down on developers as annoyances because designers, rich people, and celebrities are their north star... because it's all about the elite culture and lifestyle.
> With devcontainer I think VSCode still runs directly on my machine but connects to the container, so this is nto a solution for me, I need a real VM.
why?
I don't understand why you need a real VM here for a dev environment, you don't.
A docker file-based dev container will work on your machine and then work just the same with dockerfile deployed wherever in the cloud or on a server.
FWIW, I've used VMWare Fusion on Mac OS for years (and their Workstation product on Linux/Windows since 1999). It has worked well for me so far. VirtualBox used to be not great on MacOS with multiple CPUs and lots of interrupts - I noticed problems when moving from a Mac laptop with a spinning HDD to NVMe SSDs. The slow inter-processor interrupts (IPIs) and some related contention caused concurrent IOs to get very slow with fast SSDs with VirtualBox (back when still running on an Intel Mac with VMWare kernel module). In fact, I could get more IOPS out of the VM with fio when giving just 1-2 vCPUs to the VM, vs 4-8 vCPUs.
I haven't tested VirtuaBox on latest Mac versions as I'm happy with VMWare Fusion (also on ARM M1/M2 machines). The product is still good, regardless of Broadcom's business shenanigans.
Edit: If Parallels works for you, but only the SSH terminal sessions get stuck, maybe the "shared network" connection drops your connections for some reason. Before diving too deep into troubleshooting this across layers, you could try out the usual suspects workaround, setting SSH TCP keepalive. I have this for some connections in my ~/.ssh/config file:
You didn’t explain why you wanted to use debian, you don’t have to, but there are a lot of x86 based laptops out there that will run various linux distros so I wonder why you’re on a Mac to start with? Employer choice and not yours?
You mention Typescript which I’ll assume means some sort of web development, one thing to maybe consider is looking at https://omakub.org/ for inspiration on hardware choices and a setup. I don’t use it but was looking at it recently out of curiousity (I do Rails so thats how I’m aware of DHH and him leaving Apple HW).
podman and Docker run just fine on arm macOS. Both also support multiple architectures through emulation. Docker supports: arm64 amd64 amd64/v2 riscv64 ppc64le s390x and 386.
Also, dev containers should == server containers. This is the proper way to develop, and it's entirely unreasonable and impractical to also foist a server OS as a developer laptop OS. Use the most useful, comfortable, and practical developer desktop OS... which, sadly, is rarely Linux even these days because app support and OS usability still isn't at parity with the $$ ones post-Canonical. Invariably, it's Mac or Windows. If someone also wishes to make their lives more difficult (or perhaps easier), then all power to them to run a Linux distro or FreeBSD.
On Windows I've had good experiences running Linux under virtualization. Right now my RSS reader and Image sorter are running under WSL2 with no problems. I used to use VirtualBox and it worked pretty well.
It is an Apple problem. Virtualization has been solved for good, even the cheapest consumer hardware has virtualization support since at least a decade by now and I sometimes run virtual machines on a 4GB netbook with an Atom processor just for fun.
I am running 100% automatically deployed/configured Debian desktops on Apple hardware for several years now, Intel and M1 CPUs. (100% reproducible is another level and another story).
Right now and for most of the past years I am running VMWare Fusion, which works with the features I need as long as you don't update macOS immediately after a new major revision was released. (Apple messing up internal APIs nearly every time.)
Sometimes in the past I also used the QEMU version provided by macPorts, and the only issue I had was with my non English keyboard, if you use a US keyboard layout you shouldn't have any issues at all.
Still, I am surprised, you seem to imply that you need to provision a new VM because of trouble with TypeScript/VSCode? Not sure what you are doing, or what plugins in VSCode you are running, but that I have to provision an entirely new VM to solve such kind of problems never happened to me and I haven't heard about that in my environment (big company, quite a lot of VSCode and TypeScript users).
Sounds like an Apple problem?
Virtualization is definitely solved for your use case on Linux. Personally I use virt-manager for the UI but its all qemu underneath AFAIK.
This works but qemu definitely isn't fast like VMWare or VirtualBox IME. It works fine for my HomeAssistant.
qemu-kvm woth cpu=host is definitely as fast as it can be, at least on intel platforms with vt-d/vt-x.
I will double check my settings, it is an i7-8x or i7-9x, so should definitely support vt*.
Thank you for setting me right, @znpy!
Yeah the thing is, when using vt-d/vt-x and the kernel-assisted virtualisation (kvm) what’s happening is that a virtualised cpu core is effectively a process on the host system, and it’s given essentially access to the real cpu for most instructions (at least for those that are safe to be executed) so you’re really getting no noticeable slowdown.
I/O is another area of focus. Some cpus and NICs support srv-io (i think that’s the name) which remove hops between the hardware and the guest os. If you have the necessary hardware you can of course delegate an entire pci-connected device to a virtual machine, or delegate a whole disk to it (see virtio).
But in general qemu-kvm is the fastest you can get, and the most featureful.
https://docs.kernel.org/driver-api/virtio/virtio.html
One fun thing is that you can use qemu-kvm to run amazon linux 2023 virtual machines on your laptop. I’m looking into running it on my proxmox virtualisation cluster at home for the lulz.
Here's a pedantic tangent... fair warning
Virtualization is a solved problem. In fact, it's the virtualization of the IBM 1401 that was made available as an option on the IBM 360 systems that caused (or greatly contributed to) the Y2K problem a few decades back.
Because new architectures and instruction sets happened every few years, the expected lifespan of any program back in the 1950s-60s was expected to be less than a decade. Combined with the eye-watering price of memory back then, it made sense to save every possible bit of RAM. Those programs weren't expected to be alive anywhere near the year 2000, when many of their assumptions about dates would prove invalid.
You can emulate a 1401, System 360, PDP-11, VAX 11/780, IBM PC, or pretty much any mass produced computer more than 20 years old on your computer, or even on your smartphone. It'll run with almost perfect fidelity, except that it'll likely run way too fast for timing related things. (I'm looking at you, Turbo Pascal runtime)
The problem is that the whole virtualization situation was left as an afterthought in the Apple ecosystem, and it got worse during the Apple Silicon transition years.
Just now things are starting to catch up, but there's still a wide gap in features; Apple Virtualization Framework is still very limited. And a personal limitation I hit recently, no USB4/Thunderbolt passthrough anywhere, not in UTM (which uses AVF), not in VMWare either.
Also remember the final Apple Silicon version of VMWare supporting M1/M2 wasn't available until November 2022 (it was a tech preview before), while all the Broadcom situation was ensuing. And I think only as of 2024 it runs smoothly. So far it's still the most reliable for desktop Linux VMs for me. Windows 11 for ARM runs very well too, and it does x86 emulation transparently, even 2010s games run well.
The uncomfortable reason is, despite WWDC hooplah and ostensible dev support, Apple looks down on developers as annoyances because designers, rich people, and celebrities are their north star... because it's all about the elite culture and lifestyle.
I see. But how exactly do I get VMWare now if I can't log into Broadcom's website?
You have to create an account with an email address they accept.
> With devcontainer I think VSCode still runs directly on my machine but connects to the container, so this is nto a solution for me, I need a real VM.
why?
I don't understand why you need a real VM here for a dev environment, you don't. A docker file-based dev container will work on your machine and then work just the same with dockerfile deployed wherever in the cloud or on a server.
see : https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/create-dev-...
> Work with a container deployed application defined by an image, Dockerfile, or Docker Compose.
FWIW, I've used VMWare Fusion on Mac OS for years (and their Workstation product on Linux/Windows since 1999). It has worked well for me so far. VirtualBox used to be not great on MacOS with multiple CPUs and lots of interrupts - I noticed problems when moving from a Mac laptop with a spinning HDD to NVMe SSDs. The slow inter-processor interrupts (IPIs) and some related contention caused concurrent IOs to get very slow with fast SSDs with VirtualBox (back when still running on an Intel Mac with VMWare kernel module). In fact, I could get more IOPS out of the VM with fio when giving just 1-2 vCPUs to the VM, vs 4-8 vCPUs.
I haven't tested VirtuaBox on latest Mac versions as I'm happy with VMWare Fusion (also on ARM M1/M2 machines). The product is still good, regardless of Broadcom's business shenanigans.
Edit: If Parallels works for you, but only the SSH terminal sessions get stuck, maybe the "shared network" connection drops your connections for some reason. Before diving too deep into troubleshooting this across layers, you could try out the usual suspects workaround, setting SSH TCP keepalive. I have this for some connections in my ~/.ssh/config file:
TCPKeepalive yes
ServerAliveInterval 30
Are you looking to run Debian desktop or server?
Have you tried using Colima [1] with a Docker volume, instead of all those heavyweight tools?
[1] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima
Just a Debian desktop.
I think I need a full VM, since I am working on stuff that require a fully isolated environment.
Debian has in-progress Apple M1 support:
https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Bananas
Maybe try the open source qemu support for the macOS Hypervisor.framework (HVF)?
https://www.arthurkoziel.com/qemu-ubuntu-20-04/ https://www.arthurkoziel.com/running-virt-manager-and-libvir...
You didn’t explain why you wanted to use debian, you don’t have to, but there are a lot of x86 based laptops out there that will run various linux distros so I wonder why you’re on a Mac to start with? Employer choice and not yours?
You mention Typescript which I’ll assume means some sort of web development, one thing to maybe consider is looking at https://omakub.org/ for inspiration on hardware choices and a setup. I don’t use it but was looking at it recently out of curiousity (I do Rails so thats how I’m aware of DHH and him leaving Apple HW).
I use a MacBook Air M1 as my dev laptop, and I just wanted to have a reproducible dev environment running Debian.
Computers are cattle not pets and the simplest technical solution is a laptop that supports Debian. A Thinkpad for example.
Removing a dependency on VM’s would be a reasonable engineering strategy.
podman and Docker run just fine on arm macOS. Both also support multiple architectures through emulation. Docker supports: arm64 amd64 amd64/v2 riscv64 ppc64le s390x and 386.
Also, dev containers should == server containers. This is the proper way to develop, and it's entirely unreasonable and impractical to also foist a server OS as a developer laptop OS. Use the most useful, comfortable, and practical developer desktop OS... which, sadly, is rarely Linux even these days because app support and OS usability still isn't at parity with the $$ ones post-Canonical. Invariably, it's Mac or Windows. If someone also wishes to make their lives more difficult (or perhaps easier), then all power to them to run a Linux distro or FreeBSD.
podman and Docker run just fine on arm macOS
If virtualization is solved, then the OP's question is moot.
However based on the question, the OP does not appear to think virtualization is solved yet.
You're conflating 2 things disingenuously. The technology is solved, the dev/userX usability isn't.
That seems to be the simplest solution, yes
Qubes (Xen). It's poorly-documented and doesn't offer a simple-enough, useful devX/UX. This would be the best starting point.
Apple fails to offer true, useful nested virtualization.
Canonical (Ubuntu) is run by unreasonable people.
VMware ESXi... for servers and Brocade sucks.
It's because you're using macOS. Either run Debian directly or virtualize it on another distribution.
On Windows I've had good experiences running Linux under virtualization. Right now my RSS reader and Image sorter are running under WSL2 with no problems. I used to use VirtualBox and it worked pretty well.
Yep, on Windows you have WSL and Hyper-V
There is also a simple macOS Hypervisor.framework wrapper here:
https://github.com/evansm7/vftool
That mentions this GUI tool:
https://github.com/KhaosT/SimpleVM
8GB RAM and 4 performance cores?