Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)
234 points by krackers
by kylec
6 subcomments
This is a very silly restriction, at least to apply uniformly to all Macs. I think if you buy a more powerful Mac they should let you virtualize more Mac instances. Like an M5 maybe limit to 2, but maybe let an M5 Pro do 4 and an M5 Max do 8 or something.
by dvrp
0 subcomment
Seems Mykola Grymalyuk started working at Apple 2 years after this blog post. You either die a hero..
by czk
2 subcomments
starting with M3+ you can use Hypervisor.framework/Virtualization.framework to spin up nested VMs.
it would be amusing if that bypassed the limit.
by Khalid_nowaf
4 subcomments
I’m very curious, why did Apple put such a limitation?
by rayiner
0 subcomment
It’s crazy that you can compile a custom kernel and it’ll boot and the GUI will run.
by RestartKernel
1 subcomments
This is a really cool article, but the existence of such an arbitrary limit on any serious development platform is weird.
by jadar
0 subcomment
> When using a custom kernel collection with Apple Silicon, there are some unfortunate downsides. The biggest being that streamlined OS updates are no longer available.
This might be a blessing in disguise.
by obilgic
1 subcomments
Can this work with lume as well? Currently it has a similar limitation.
by edude03
1 subcomments
IIRC you can just turn off sip and set the boot argument that controls it without a custom kernel
by mrweasel
1 subcomments
Apple has a 2 VM limit?
by ab_testing
5 subcomments
Very funny to see HN hate on Microsoft and Google but then love a company where they cannot even run an app on their mobile platform without Apple's permission or only a certain number of VMs on the hardware they own .
by erichocean
0 subcomment
Another limitation: only five active user accounts (with UIs) per machine.
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