


UTM leverages the native hypervisor framework in macOS alongside the open source quick emulator (QEMU) framework that is used for virtualizing operating systems on Linux. Instead of buying an expensive Parallels or VMWare Fusion license to run a VM of Linux (slowly) on the M1, you can use the free Universal Turing Machine (UTM) app. Luckily, the most common VM that an IT systems administrator or developer will install is Linux, and ARM versions of Linux have been common for well over a decade now. And while it’s possible to run virtual machines of both Windows and Linux operating systems made for the Intel platform on the M1, the performance cost of translating Intel instructions to ARM is high (even with the optimizations Apple has within their M1 CPU). One of the biggest worries that IT pros have regarding Apple’s new ARM-based M1 platform is the ability to run virtual machines (VMs) of other operating systems using hypervisor software. Whether you're learning the Linux operating system, using Linux to manage your server fleet in the cloud, performing a cybersecurity penetration test using Linux tools or testing the web apps you’ve created on a Linux server, you can do it at near-native speed without costly software on an M1-based Mac system. What Renewal Options Are Available to You?.There's no support for high DPI displays (or associated display scaling) I can figure out, so no retina support, yet, and the builds of Qemu that work on M1 Macs don't (yet?) support Qemu's savevm command to save a snapshot of the running VM - so you're going to boot into and shut down the VM each and every time you want to use it - there's no support, yet, for saving the current state of the VM like you might be used to using in Parallels or VirtualBox, when running Qemu on an M1 Mac.


It more or less works, and it doesn't lag on my end (an M1 MacBook Pro), but a couple of caveats: I've used the ARM Mac builds of Qemu that are floating around to install Ubuntu in a Qemu VM, using the ARM build of Ubuntu Focal desktop (Ubuntu 20.04).
