Alpha releases are not recommended for production use, which makes a report from Jason Eckert (Dean of Technology at triOS College in Ontario, Canada) surprising.
A compelling optionĪn option worth looking at is Asahi Linux – a port of Arch Linux that runs natively on the M1, released in alpha last month. There is still some friction though, especially when going the open source route, with extra configuration steps needed. Performance is good according to reports like this, which reported a virtualisation penalty of 6.7 per cent for single-core and 27 per cent for multi-core when running Arch Linux under emulation.
That said, the story is improving for virtualization of Arm-based operating systems – whether using systems based on the open source qemu project, or commercial systems such as VMware Fusion (in public preview) or Parallels Desktop (which supports Windows on Arm for M1). VMware lamented last year that “Rosetta 2 doesn’t support virtualization,” and added that “there isn’t exactly much business value relative to the engineering effort that is required … Running x86 operating systems on Apple Silicon is not something we are planning to deliver.” Virtualization is important for developers because it is ideal for testing and debugging applications in an isolated environment. Rosetta 2 is a translation layer that enables x86 applications to run on macOS, but while it works well for many macOS applications, the M1 is not good for running x86 virtual machines. There are some snags with the move away from Intel though. Windows on Arm running on M1 Mac via UTM (qemu) Apple M1 machines can be good value despite the premium price if they save developers time, and the combination of excellent performance and high efficiency – leading to long battery life for those on a laptop – is a strong attraction.Ī high-end Mac Studio running the M1 Ultra chip has a maximum power consumption of 215W, according to Apple’s specs – modest for a system that is among the best-performing workstations out there. In November 2020 Apple introduced the M1 processor – an Arm-based chip marking the beginning of the transition from Intel CPUs to Apple Silicon.
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