Can Apple please just make a simple Virtualization front end ala libvirts Virtual Machine Manager. They seem to have all the bits, just need to bring them all together.
Seems like they're leaving that part up to the dev community (which I'm fine with). They'll never be able to make every person and every use case happy, so better to just give us the tools to do so ourselves. Check out UTM if you want a GUI for hypervisor.framework powered VMs.
I investigated virtualization framework recently and I'm kind of impressed. They really implemented a lot of things. And coming updates makes it even better.
Here's what I've learned:
1. You can run console Linux. But you need to download ARM ISO, extract kernel and initrd and find out exact kernel parameters. Not a big issue, but probably can't be done automatically. You can't just boot ISO.
2. Disk support is bad. No snapshots, etc. Just single file. I think that you can emulate snapshots with APFS CoW support, but that's not as good as something like qcow2.
3. No GUI support (for Linux, for macOS there's GUI support but I have no idea how it works).
4. Network support is limited. You can run NAT but then you can't communicate with host. You can run bridge, but I don't like this mode and didn't even try it. You can implement userspace networking completely by yourself, but that's a lot of work and I didn't try it either. But I think that if someone would want to build a virtualization frontend, he had to do it. Otherwise basic features like port mapping will not be available.
Now from what I read at this topic: ISO boot is coming, UEFI support is coming, Linux GUI support is coming. And I guess with enough tinkering it should be possible to run other BSDs, as they just leverage standard virtio protocols.
Also Windows virtualization theoretically should be possible. I mean it's just another UEFI OS. You would need to put virtio drivers, but Redhat wrote virtio drivers (for x86, but should be possible to compile for ARM).
I just wish that this virtualization framework was more extensible. Right now it's like use it or drop it. For example I didn't find any way to implement qcow2 support while using it for other things.
how feasible is the x86 windows virtualization? ive looked into UTM but it seems to be quite slow, how easy would it be to port this to windows then? "theoretically possible" could mean anything, but its a shot in the dark, haha.
I think this WWDC session will discuss that exact scenario. From the short description, I think they are still going to let the community handle the wiring of this into a VM management application. But, hopefully, this tutorial will make this process much clearer. I’ve tried to follow some of the older Framework examples, but I didn’t make it very far.
