Running Solus VM on Apple Silicon

ahahn94

Hi.

I'm André and since 2018, I have been the 3rd party package maintainer for the JetBrains IDEs.
I have since moved from Solus on a T440 to using macOS as my main OS (since 2020), but still take care of the packages for our 3rd party repo every weekend, using a VM.

I switched to a new MacBook with an M3 Pro chip yesterday, and now I can't use my VMware Fusion VMs anymore, as Fusion only supports virtualization on the same processor architecture as the host.

Now I'm trying to get everything up and running again with QEMU, as it support emulation of AMD64 on ARM.
As it can be quite a long and tedious process to figure out the right VM settings on my own, I wanted to ask our Solus community if anyone is running a similar setup and can give me a few hints.

Any help is greatly appreciated :-)

diagnostics0

I haven't a clue.

However you may want to get in contact with the Fedora Asahi Remix community. They have Fedora running on Apple Silicon and may have answers you are looking for

davidjharder

Maybe this https://github.com/utmapp/UTM ?

You've picked an interesting way to run Solus, that's for sure!

ahahn94

davidjharder I already tried with UTM. I got the VM to run, based on an x86 image for Ubuntu that was already prepared for running in emulation. But sadly it is rather crouching than running 😅
For the updates of last weekend, I ran the VM on my old Gaming PC, but sadly it ran slower than on my old 2020 MacBook Pro (the PC is at least 5 years older, so shouldn’t be a surprise). But still much faster than in emulation.

Sadly, only single x86 applications can leverage the performance boost from rosetta2, but not whole systems.
I could e.g. run an ARM version of Ubuntu in Parallels Desktop and use rosetta2 to run x86 applications inside the ARM VM. But Solus isn’t available for ARM.

ahahn94

In the end, I created a dual boot setup on my Gaming PC and configured AnyDesk for remote access via my Mac. Nowadays I‘m only gaming on my PlayStation, so I configured the PC to automatically boot into Solus.

At the moment, running x86 Solus in a VM on Apple Silicon Macs doesn’t provide the required performance for any day to day tasks, so it really isn’t an option for building packages.