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After moving from an Intel MacBook Pro to an M1, I’ve lost the ability to run Ubuntu in a VM with Vagrant.

If I understand right, this is an important step to getting an Apple Silicon version of Ubuntu, correct?




You can run Ubuntu in VM today (and have been able to do so since day 1 of Apple Silicon machines). It’s possible that vagrant doesn’t support this, and you need different VM software (UTM and parallels both work).

This is about getting Ubuntu and other linux distros to run bare metal on Apple Silicon without virtualisation or macOS being invovled.


Thanks. Your answer is mentioning UTM and Parallels, which would mean we're emulating x86 commands, correct?

Like some of the other answers here mention, if there's an arm build for Ubuntu, this would get things closer to running natively on Apple Silicon I think?

I am indeed trying to ensure Vagrant will work, since that's the technology we've typically used on our team, and we have some tooling setup to take advantage of it.

Vagrant is nice because it automatically shares a folder with the regular desktop, and we have all of our setup ready to go. But I imagine I could get Parallels or UTM to do the same thing... although I wonder how much extra CPU cycles and battery drain I'll have. But as long as I can get it to work, I'd be generally happy.


> Your answer is mentioning UTM and Parallels, which would mean we're emulating x86 commands, correct? ... if there's an arm build for Ubuntu

There is indeed an ARM build for Ubuntu (and has been for over a decade!), and this is what you would most likely want to run in a VM on an Apple Silicon machine. You can also run the x86 version emulated, but this will of course be much slower. As of the latest macOS releases, it's even possible to use Apple's "rosetta" translation software to run translated x86 binaries within an ARM linux VM, and this is likely the best thing to try first if you are using software that doesn't have ARM versions.


Yeah you need an aarch64 Linux build. Suggest just using UTM if you don't need anything fancy. Pretty sure they have an ARM64 Ubuntu image in their gallery thing.

I'm running Archlinux ARM in a VM as my primary development environment on an M2 Macbook Pro and it works great.


They list an ARM64 Ubuntu image in their gallery - https://mac.getutm.app/gallery/ubuntu-20-04 - but there is no download link.

Any idea how to get that? I would love to give it a shot.


Just install UTM and it will allow you to install from gallery. There is probably a way to download the disk image directly but the app will handle it for you to get started.


Multipass (from Canonical) could be a useful tool for you, they're supporting M1 since the 1.8 version.

https://multipass.run/


You should be able to run Ubuntu with a VM in Vagrant just fine in a M1 too, in MacOs, without Asahi.

It just needs to be ARM Ubuntu, not Intel Ubuntu.


I am finding no ARM Ubuntu images on https://app.vagrantup.com/boxes/search that work with VirtualBox unfortunately.


docker desktop certainly runs some type of linux in a vm to support the containers you run in it. So it's certainly possible, probably just need to do some research.


On the weekend I set up a arm version of Fedora in a vm (in the free version of VMware)on my M1 Air, it worked quite well.




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