🐇 Booting VirtualBox x86 Virtual Disk Images …It's a delight to use, and not too difficult to set up either.

“ Windows on ARM” is fast on UTM with the M1 Max. A screenshot of the UTM app for Mac kickstarting a new virtual machine, and the choice to “Virtualize” or ”Emulate” depending on the host and virtual machine's hardware/software intercompatibility. It'll even let you boot older PowerPC builds of Mac OS 9, for example. UTM (which is powered by QEMU) is a free download (although it costs something if you get it from the Mac App Store instead of the website directly), and supports a lot more than just virtualizing macOS instances or emulating x86 architecture. Getting UTM + virtualizing “Windows on ARM” I researched this situation a bit, and found that UTM was a great way to run an ARM-supported version of Windows, but I still had the hope to access my prior Windows x86 installation from VirtualBox so that I could grab any files and software configurations that I still needed from there. The ARM architecture of Apple silicon couldn't simply be “partitioned” or shared with a virtualized software system that was expecting access to real x86 hardware.

However, since VirtualBox is a hypervisor, I couldn't simply run my x86 Virtual Machines this way anymore. One of the pieces of software I used on my machine rarely but intentionally was VirtualBox, a virtualization product that can be used to run additional operating systems on your Intel-based Mac (or other x86 machine) such as Microsoft Windows.

Before I switched to a 2021 MacBook Pro with the M1 Max ( Apple silicon using the ARM architecture), I was on an older Intel-based ( x86) MacBook Pro like everyone else using otherwise recent Mac hardware.

Qemu m1 mac