Virtualization framework is a high-level API to create macOS and Linux virtual machines. Hypervisor is a low-level API to build virtualization solutions without the need for a kernel extension. If you’re interested in containers on the Mac, check out the Containerization package and its associated container tool. Virtualization: Forums subtopic: App & System Services > Core OS Forums tag: Virtualization Virtualization framework documentation Using iCloud with macOS virtual machines documentation article Use iCloud on a virtual machine support article Running macOS in a virtual machine on Apple silicon sample code Running Linux in a Virtual Machine sample code Running GUI Linux in a virtual machine on a Mac sample code Building macOS apps with Xcode 26 on macOS 26 VM forums thread — This thread describes how the development experience in VMs has improved recently, and one remaining issue that you might bump in to. Hypervisor: Forums subtopic: App & System Services > Core OS Forums tag: Hypervisor Hypervisor framework documentation Share and Enjoy — Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Subject: Virtualization.framework VM execution ownership and crash reclamation on Intel macOS Monterey Hello, I’m investigating the lifecycle guarantees of Virtualization.framework on Intel macOS Monterey 12.7.x. The specific scenario is a VZVirtualMachine running a Linux guest. I need to understand the ownership and reclamation behavior when the process holding the VZVirtualMachine is abruptly terminated without calling stop() or performing normal cleanup. The key questions are: For a specific VZVirtualMachine on Intel macOS Monterey, which userspace task/process actually owns the Hypervisor VM and the vCPU threads backing guest execution? Is Hypervisor execution owned directly by the calling process, or by a separate process such as: com.apple.Virtualization.VirtualMachine or another Virtualization.framework backend? If the process holding the VZVirtualMachine is terminated with SIGKILL or crashes without executing cleanup code, is the underlying guest execution context necessarily destroyed? More specifically: Can guest vCPU execution continue after the client process has died? If a separate backend process owns the VM, is that backend guaranteed to terminate or destroy the VM when the client dies? Does this behavior apply to Intel macOS Monterey 12.7.x, or only to newer macOS releases? Is there a supported diagnostic on Monterey that can map one specific VZVirtualMachine instance to the task/process that actually owns its Hypervisor VM/vCPU execution? For example, would a diagnostic showing Hypervisor execution frames such as hv_vcpu_run in a process, combined with a reliable process-exit notification, be sufficient to establish that ownership relationship? If the Virtualization backend can survive the client process, what supported VM-specific recovery or termination mechanism is available to another process? The security property I need to establish is intentionally narrow: If the userspace owner of a VM is abruptly destroyed, guest computation must not be able to continue indefinitely as an independent execution domain. Persistent disk files or other inert VM artifacts are not the concern; the question is specifically about live guest/vCPU execution and its ownership lifecycle. I’m looking for the supported architectural contract or diagnostic approach, not undocumented implementation details. Target environment: macOS Monterey 12.7.x Intel x86_64 Virtualization.framework Hypervisor.framework Hardware virtualization available No private APIs or privileged/kernel extensions Thank you.

There have been 2 serious regressions in the hypervisor framework since developer beta 6 of macOS 27 that have continued into the final release, and the first beta of 27.2 The first is that since developer beta 6 of macOS 27, virtual machines that have an Apple ID with iCloud+ signed in fail to route traffic in Safari through iCloud Private Relay despite it being on. Parallels, UTM, VirtualBuddy have all been tested and the issue applies to all of them, exposing the host machine's IP address. I have reported the issue since I discovered it and there hasn't been any communication that Apple even knows its an issue to my open report in Feedback Assistant. The second issue is a newer one, and it affects macOS 26.6.2 and earlier virtual machines. Attempting to install 26.7 through the built-in software update causes the virtual machine to black screen upon reboot during the installation. Forcing the machine off and back on causes the virtual machine to revert back to macOS 26.6.2. There has been no available IPSW file to test if a clean install of 26.7 in a virtual machine is a viable workaround, or to see if there is a bug in the updating mechanism or bug in the 26.7 release itself in virtual machines. The Parallels Desktop forum is beginning to get reports from users of that software of the same black screen issue trying to update their own 26.6.2 VMs to 26.7. These issues have also not been corrected in either 27.2 Beta 1 nor 26.7.1 Has anyone found a workaround to either of these 2 issues, or submitted similar reports and got any kind of response from Apple? The feedback reports about these issues are FB24828992 and FB24791716

Does Virtualization.framework support delegating a Thunderbolt/PCIe device to a Linux guest VM running on Apple Silicon? We're developing a custom PCIe device and would like to iterate on the driver in a Linux VM environment on the same host.

hello, how can I trap specific standard system registers of a vCPU in Hypervisor framework? like the ARM standard HSTR_EL2, which I don't see exposed in the headers.

As the title states, I’ve been trying to emulate some older Direct9 games, and rosetta can’t handle it because of that https://github.com/WineAndAqua/rosettax87 I’ve had to use this, but it really seems like something that I shouldn’t have to do I’ve tried Wineskin, wine, D9VK, MoltenVK, GPTk, and the only thing that’s close to working is using devel wine + d9vk with the xrosetta87 running like its a VPN, and then you play Without xrosetta87 it’s 0-0.5 FPS? with it, it’s like a buttery smooth 60+

I'm pleased to share some significant updates that have recently been released for our Hypervisor and Virtualization frameworks. We've focused on enhancing efficiency, expanding capabilities, and addressing common developer needs. I believe these will be valuable for many of you. Here’s a look at what’s new: Hypervisor Updates We've introduced support for configuring the intermediate physical address (IPA) memory granularity of a VM. This allows for more granular memory mappings, enabling granularity sizes down to 4KB. This is particularly useful for certain specialized device drivers requiring finer memory control. Virtualization Framework Updates More Efficient VM Image Storage with ASIF: We've integrated support for the Apple Sparse Image Format (ASIF). This results in a smaller disk footprint and optimized transfer for VM disk images when using VZDiskImageStorageDeviceAttachment, improving storage efficiency. Custom Network Topologies with vmnet: We've added support for vmnet custom network topologies. This enables more flexible VM-to-VM communication based on logical networks with customized configurations, useful for complex testing or development environments. See VZVmnetNetworkDeviceAttachment to get started. Simplified VM Queue Discovery: It's now easier to discover a VM’s on-process thanks to a new property on VZVirtualMachine. This should aid in development and debugging when interacting directly with the VM's queue. These are some of the key highlights of the first beta, and I'm looking forward to seeing how these improvements will be utilized. I encourage you to explore the documentation for full details on these features.

Hi! I'm trying to figure out what mechanism request stop sends to the guest to actually request a stop. It doesn't appear that Virtualization.framework implements any ACPI bits relating to power buttons, so unclear how a linux VM would detect that a request has been stopped. I don't see any documentation around what devices are implemented by Virtualization.framework either, in terms of things like realtime clock, etc. Thanks for any help!

I have a Hypervisor Framework App that works on MacOS 14 and 15 but fails on MacOS 26. To reproduce: hv_vm_config_t vm_config = hv_vm_config_create(); result = hv_vm_create(vm_config); result == HV_DENIED /* (0xfae94007) */ (from per the header file - not present on the online documentation) com.apple.security.hypervisor is set, no other VMs are running (no Virtualization Framework and no Hypervisor Framework). I have tried various entitlements with no success. Sandbox is off.

Is it possible to expose a custom VirtIO device to a Linux guest running inside a VM — likely using QEMU backed by Hypervisor.framework. The guest would see this device as something like /dev/npu0, and it would use a kernel driver + userspace library to submit inference requests. On the macOS host, these requests would be executed using CoreML, MPSGraph, or BNNS. The results would be passed back to the guest via IPC. Does the macOS allow this kind of "fake" NPU / GPU

How does VMWare access USB devices without have any specifics of the USB device? Does it use the same profile/entitlement process or does it take a different approach?

Hi, been exploring macOS VM on both Parallels and UTM and they lack some "GPU/graphics" things vs native MacOS which could be useful on some situations (testing some non trusted graphics apps on a Mac VM) so providing similar usefulness as Windows Sandbox.. Current limitations: 1)In MacOS VM night mode doesn't work.. 2)HDR support isn't exposed even when enabling HDR on host 3)missing GPTK support for the Paravirtual GPU (Paravitual GPU supports Metal but isn't enough for GPTK to work which complains about unsupported GPU).. 4)OpenCL is supported but only the CPU device.. so expose GPU device in addition to current CPU only device.. 5)OpenGL only supports the software renderer.. I assume OpenGL driver on Apple M1-4 GPUs being Metal based, and being Metal supported no reason for software renderer only thanks..

Hi, REQUEST 1: seems Microsoft is ahead of Apple in X86 ARM emulation support at least in features supported.. see: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2024/11/06/announcing-windows-11-insider-preview-build-27744-canary-channel/ x64 emulated applications through Prism will now have support for additional extensions to the x86 instruction set architecture. These extensions include AVX and AVX2, as well as BMI, FMA, F16C BMI1/2 and F16C aren't yet supported by Rosetta.. would be useful for games like Alan Wake 2.. so asking for Rosetta equaling features to Prism emulator.. REQUEST 2: there is no way to currently enable AVX1/2 on Rosetta Linux.. on macOS using export ROSETTA_ADVERTISE_AVX=1 does the trick.. but not on Linux VM's.. tested setting this via: /bin/launchctl setenv ROSETTA_ADVERTISE_AVX 1 on Mac before VM launch and inside Linux VM but AVX2 isn't exposed..

Hi, Since recently there is interest in having faster x87 translation speeds than Rosetta offers.. mainly some old PC games getting stuck at less than 5fps using Wine that uses Rosetta..( some world of warcraft game for ex.).. so main case right now, is games using old fmodex library versions (dll or statically)that uses heavy x87 instructions for audio processing , and such games not being threaded ,stalls the render threead, which is the same thread.. Luckily there is a hack, see: https://github.com/Lifeisawful/rosettax87 ”This is an experimental project that modifies Apple's Rosetta technology to use less precise but significantly faster x87 instruction handlers. The benchmarks show approximately 4-5x performance improvement for x87 floating-point operations.” but limitations are: 1)it runs only on specific Mac version (15.4.1) due to searching some fixed offsets in current rosetta library that may change with mac updates.. 2)requires to run two binaries (a server and the launcher program).. 3)currently doesn’t seem to accelerating x87 instruction on Linux programs/binaries i.e. lacking support for Rosetta on Linux if Apple supports similar technology, it could providing some enviroment variable like ROSETTA_FAST_X87 for enabling/disabling this fast emulation similar to how Rosetta AVX support not enabled by default.. thanks..

I have developed an app to create and run virual machines using mac os virtualization framework for apple siicon and intel macs. I have tried ubuntu, fedora, debian & linux mint distros and they all worked fine with intel macs. But when i try to run other distros like mx linux, manjaro, pop os, endevour os etc on intel mac they all on booting iso just shows the black screen. is there any list of officilay support linux distros for intel macs and apple silicon. the support of linux distros are fairly limited or am i missing something.

I'm testing the newly introduced nested virt API from Hypervisor.framework on an M3 Pro running 15.3.1. First, I'm calling "hv_vm_config_get_el2_supported" to confirm the system supports nested virt, then "hv_vm_config_set_el2_enabled" to enable EL2 in the configuration and finally "hv_vm_config_get_el2_enabled" to confirm it's enabled. After creating the VM with this configuration, I've confirmed with assembly code (checking CurrentEL) that the vCPU is still starting in EL1. Something has definitely changed in the vCPU management, because SMCCC calls that worked fine without calling "hv_vm_config_set_el2_enabled" now trigger an "EC_INSNABORT", but from the guest perspective the vCPU is definitely still in EL1. Is there an additional requirement in addition to calling to "hv_vm_config_set_el2_enabled" to make the vCPU start in EL2?

I can see that a MacOS VM guest running on top of an Apple Silicon MacOS host has GPU acceleration - indicating GPU sharing capabilities for the hardware. Is there also a way to have GPU acceleration in Linux guests (with Vulkan/Mesa drivers)?

I have a MacMini M2 machine running Sequoia 15.1 OS. On this machine, I am running a Virtual Machine, utilizing the Virtualization.Framework, with the same OS version, 15.1. Logging into my account in the System Settings is successful. Next, I need to add my account in Xcode 16.1. While the initial login is successful, Xcode immediately displays the following error: Decoding Error. There was a failure decoding response: (HTTP 401, 60 bytes) The data couldn’t be read because it isn’t in the correct format. As a result, I cannot see any account information, teams, etc. A very similar bug has been reported at this issue - https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/759877, but there has been no progress or updates there. Is there any chance to fix this and get it working?

Hi, It seems that on M4 devices any virtual machine with macOS version older than 13.4 fail to boot, they stuck with a black screen. This is regardless of the virtualization software used (UTM, VirtualBuddy, Viable, etc...). After talking to many people everyone experiences the same. At least for me, this is a massive limitation of the platform, I really hope this is a bug which can be fixed. Thanks, Csaba

I'm curious if there is a way to add a programmatically controlled keyboard and pointing device to a virtual machine created using Virtualization.framework (for the purposes of sandboxed automation). All of the types I've found in that framework have very little in the way of configurability and seem to be uniquely intended for use with a VZVirtualMachineView. On the other hand, Hypervisor.framework seems extremely low-level so I'm wondering if there is something in between the two I can use to achieve this.