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canonical / multipass

Multipass orchestrates virtual Ubuntu instances
https://multipass.run
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M1/M2 Macs 10.15 and up - enable the virtualbox local.driver as is done in Intel Macs now that VBox 7.0.x has an Apple Silicon client #2830

Open oklopfer opened 1 year ago

oklopfer commented 1 year ago

What are you trying to do? A description of what you want to happen.

Currently, the only Multipass driver on M1/M2 Macs is QEMU, which is great, but means GUI is limited to X11 forwarding, either on ssh, vnc, or rdp. Adding the virtualbox local.driver option would allow for a localized GUI which could then in theory run Wayland sessions.

What's your proposed solution? A description of how you think this could be solved, including any alternatives that you considered.

Add virtualbox allowed value for local.driver and integrate with VBoxManage using Multipass 1.11+ and VirtualBox 7.0.0+ to MacOS arm64 platforms

Additional context Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

Asahi Linux is an incredible project, but the biggest risk of it is how it messes with APFS partitioning, possibly ruining your SSD in the process. Multipass is my preferred Linux-on-ASilicon right now, because of how safe it keeps my drives and how easy it is to manage, create, destroy, etc. However, Parallels is vastly better in its graphics performance, and is the only virtualization I have found to have reliable Wayland. QEMU consistently breaks with Wayland, even using UTM (MacOS QEMU GUI). I don't know how hard it is to integrate the Parallels driver to Multipass, but the VirtualBox driver is finally looking promising.

sharder996 commented 1 year ago

Hi @oklopfer thanks for bring this up!

Support for virtualbox on Apple silicon is something that we've been watching and have plans to add it as a driver to Multipass once we are comfortable with its stability as a backend driver.

oklopfer commented 1 year ago

Hey @sharder996

Any news on virtualbox as a backend for arm64 Macs?

sharder996 commented 1 year ago

Hello, our current status on this is that we are still waiting for better support from VirtualBox. Admittedly, we haven't gotten around to checking this out again for some time. If you know of something that has come up from Oracle that promises reliable support for this, then looking into this again would probably move up on our priority list.

oklopfer commented 1 year ago

Hello, our current status on this is that we are still waiting for better support from VirtualBox. Admittedly, we haven't gotten around to checking this out again for some time. If you know of something that has come up from Oracle that promises reliable support for this, then looking into this again would probably move up on our priority list.

Been using the latest release (7.0.8 beta4) for my M1 Max, and it is quite stable in comparison to the previous versions, in my experience about equal in power to VBox on my x86_64 Ubuntu machine. Perhaps now it could be reconsidered on the priority list?

sharder996 commented 1 year ago

@townsend2010, any input on this? Does Virtualbox provide any advantages that we aren't getting with qemu?

townsend2010 commented 1 year ago

We will try out Virtualbox on Apple Silicon again as time permits and then spec out what it would take for us to support this.

JohnMasinter commented 8 months ago

Just checking in for the status of apple silicon support of virtualbox driver. Any update appreciated.

chicco785 commented 8 months ago

the major issue i currently have with multipass on apple silicon are the arp issues that limit the usage of microk8s + metallb. other multipass users on apple intel have report that this is not the case when running multipass on virtualbox.