

On VirtualBox or a similar free software (so not parallels) on an M1 chip. If you want to run X86 Windows, you need Emulator. You can only run Windows for ARM or Linux AArch64 in Parallel. Parallel is a Virtual Machine but not an Emulator.
#Virtualbox m1 windows mac#
Mac M1 has both Virtual Machine and Emulator right now. The guest OS must be able to run natively on host computer.Ī "Emulator" is a virtual hardware platform simulated in pure software, including CPU, logic board, memory, storage, network interface, etc, etc, so that a non-native guest OS can run on it. "Virtual Machine" and "Emulator" are two different things.Ī "Virtual Machine" is another guest OS running on the same host computer at the same time, and both systems share the same hardware resource. It's simply a matter of third-party virtualization vendors actually porting their products to Apple Silicon. There's nothing inherent to ARM processor designs, or Apple's M-series processors that prevents virtualization, at all. Here's the whole VM launching, showing that it's an ARM Ubuntu VM, running on an M1 Mac: There's no need to speculate about the future. ARM virtualization does the same thing, for ARM operating systems.ĭue to the ARM-architecture it is currently not possible to launch virtual machines on M1 chips. VirtualBox works by virtualizing an x86 environment on an x86 processor. You're conflating x86 emulation with virtualization, which isn't the same thing.

If you wanted x86 Linux support, or something else, you needed to ask about that, at the outset.

Edit: you've edited your question details after the fact to ask about x86 VMs.
