That doesn't mean that Parallels and VMWare won't try to sell you stuff, but they won't be running an x86 hypervisor on an ARM, nor will it be any other practical solution for running x86 apps on a Mac. A CPU simulator is an entirely different animal that runs hundreds of times slower: that's good enough for debugging but totally useless for real work.įace facts: if you go down the Apple ARM road you leave x86 behind. In VirtualBox your x86 guest code runs at near full speed directly on the host processor. Mpack wrote:I don't understand why people insist on not getting this simple fact: VirtualBox can't be ported to an ARM, because it's an x86 hypervisor, not a simulator. Dec 2009, 20:14 Primary OS: MS Windows 10 VBox Version: PUEL Guest OSses: Windows, Linux

scottgus1 Site Moderator Posts: 18377 Joined: 30.

On the other hand, Virtualbox is open source, so a Mac enthusiast or 20 could band together. Just mentioning the practical side so we don't get stuck. One or two customers probably wouldn't move ARM Virtualbox into existence unless they're the biggest customers and definitely no amount of free Virtualbox users will have any say. After that it will take enough of Oracle's rich paying customers who use Macs to want Virtualbox on ARM Macs before Oracle would port Virtualbox over to ARM (in my opinion, of course, and if it can be done). If Mac moves to ARM, Virtualbox won't run on a Mac anymore. As mentioned before, Virtualbox is not an emulator, so it cannot handle iPhone & iPad code. Apple's phones and tablets use ARM, and an emulator is needed to run ARM code on an x86 CPU.

So it is unlikely that Oracle will desire to port Virtualbox to ARM as things stand now. Virtualbox is tuned to the x86 CPU environment, not the ARM environment. While one could wish for lots of things it is important to remain grounded in reasonable expectations so we don't get stuck in 'wish mode' and never get anywhere.

Virtualbox mac os