[FEATURE REQUEST] Boot secondary, physically installed OS as a VM

[Rastafabisch]

It would be a great addition if UTM could boot other, physically on the Mac installed OS. This could be other versions of macOS as well as Windows or Linux. Parallels Desktop as well as VMWare provide this functionality, at least for Bootcamp.

This would be a great feature on Intel Mac and a stand out feature on apple silicon (for Asahi based installs).

[ktprograms]

Unfortunately because UTM is a sandboxed app, it can't access physical partitions.

You can use nbd (via qemu-nbd) to serve the partition as a block device to a Linux VM, and/or you might be able to host a network boot server to be able to boot from that partition, but I've never tried this.

Hmm @osy is the utmctl command also sandboxed, and if not, could functionality to host a network boot server be implemented eventually?

[osy]

Yes, utmctl is still sandboxed

[ktprograms]

Huh, that's unfortunate. Thanks for confirming

[martin-braun]

Oh what a bummer. Sometimes native performance is needed on a VM, for instance BOOTCAMP when gaming. Having the option to boot or virtualize from the same partition is the absolute killer feature of Parallels. I'd love to see UTM going in that direction.

@ktprograms Could a Helper Tool with higher privileges not bridge a real partition to UTM? Something like this:

Which would only be necessary to mount partitions into a VM and would stay optional for the general user who just wants to use VMs the normal way.

[ktprograms]

@martin-braun serving a block device doesn't need higher privileges AFAIK, just that it needs to be unsandboxed, which UTM can't do as it is on the App Store.

You can already do this with qemu-nbd currently, so I don't see a need for a custom UTM helper if it can't be bundled in the main UTM.app anyway.

[XavierBestelSonos]

I would gladly have an un-sandboxed UTM app for this purpose.