Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

https://khronokernel.com/macos/2023/08/08/AS-VM.html

by krackers • 3 months ago

236 166 3 months ago

kylec2• 3 months ago

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.

benoau3• 3 months ago

Why should they impose a limit at all? Your hardware is a natural limit, you'll stop of your own accord when you reach its thresholds.

naikrovek6• 3 months ago

They are likely scared of people who would run MacOS virtual desktop farms, without also buying an appropriate number of Apple machines.

That’s what I would be worried about if my primary source of income was hardware sales.

matheusmoreira5• 3 months ago

Rent seeking, of course. They want to charge you for every physical and logical machine you use. Virtualization gets around that.

They'd probably charge separately for every feature of the processor if they could.

isodev• 3 months ago

Your hardware

Ah but when you buy an iPhone or a Mac, Apple sees it as their hardware graciously made available to you for a limited time and under ToS.

m463• 3 months ago

Why should they impose a limit at all?

Whenever I see apple silliness, I have to remember:

  "You're not the target market."

colechristensen4• 3 months ago

Market design.

They don't want to be in the server business, they don't want there to be third party VM providers running Mac farms selling oversubscribed giving underpowered disappointing VM experiences to users who will complain.

A bunch of folks want Apple to enter a market Apple doesn't want to enter into. They have tools available which would enable that market which they are kneecapping on purpose so that nobody unwillingly enters them into it. The "two VMs per unit hardware" has been in their license for at least a decade.

fsckboy• 3 months ago

Why should they impose a limit at all? Your hardware is a natural limit

because imposing an artificial limit keeps them from exposing how low the natural limits turn out to be? Apple Silicon need always to be spoken with reverence, ye brother of the faith, do not fuel the faithless lest they rend and threadrip that which we've made of wholecloth.

lxgr2• 3 months ago

Because this limit isn’t about your hardware, but their software.

As appropriate a model this still is in the development VM scenario, you still need a valid license for each operating system copy you run.

Microsoft will sell you these individually; Apple apparently implicitly grants you up to three per Mac that you buy, and won’t let you pay for any more even if you want to.

In other words, what’s limited here is not really the hypervisor itself, but rather the “license granting component” that passes through the implicit permission to run macOS, but only up to some limit.

egorfine• 3 months ago

Your hardware

They see it a bit differently.

bdcravens2• 3 months ago

The limit isn't really a resource issue, since you can run pretty much an "unlimited" number of non-Mac VMs. I suspect it's more of a business decision, such as preventing people from setting up shop as a low-cost Mac VPS provider.

fortran774• 3 months ago

Maybe it doesn't work. Why are you so sure it would? It may perform very badly.

fortran774• 3 months ago

I buy a $100 Windows 11 Pro licence, and my limit is 1024 VMs

Hyper‑V on Windows 11 supports up to 1024 simultaneous VMs per host if the hardware can handle it. On my little Windows ARM laptop I can easily run 4 VMs before it runs out of steam.

kylec2• 3 months ago

The limit of 2 is just for virtualizing macOS. You can run as many Linux VMs as you want at once on macOS.

oxfeed65261• 3 months ago

On Mac, you can run lots of Windows/Linux VMs and two Mac VMs.

On Windows, you can run lots of Windows/Linux VMs and zero Mac VMs.

lxgr2• 3 months ago

But you can’t run 1024 copies of that one license. This is what this limit is actually about.

namelosw• 3 months ago

It really is silly. The other day I decided to try this openclaw thing out but concerned about the security stuff, so I took VM for a spin only to find out the iCloud and the App Store were restricted.

tomaskafka• 3 months ago

Remember you’re not battling against a HW limitation, but against Tim Cook’s fear of selling less macs.

RestartKernel2• 3 months ago

This is a really cool article, but the existence of such an arbitrary limit on any serious development platform is weird.

tempest_5• 3 months ago

Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?

I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.

thomascountz• 3 months ago

Anything being developed for the Apple ecosystem requires use of the Apple development platform. Maybe the scope could be called "unserious," but the scale cannot be ignored.

amelius• 3 months ago

It is a weird situation. Apple products are consumer products but they make us use them as development hardware because there is no other way to make software for those products.

jonhohle2• 3 months ago

For me at least, not being Linux is a feature. Linux has always been “almost Unix” to the point where now it has become its own thing for better or worse. OS X was never trying to be Linux. It would be better if we still had a few more commercial POSIX implementations.

jaredklewis• 3 months ago

At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac. Because this sample is from my experience, it’s skewed to startups and tech companies. For sure, lots of devs outside those areas, but tech companies are a big chunk of the world’s developers.

So yea I would say Apple is a “serious development platform” just given how much it dominates software development in the tech sector in the US.

morphle3• 3 months ago

Apple had real Unix a decade before the Linux crap was made, a bad unix copy. Nextstep was much better than Linux crap. "A budget of bad ideas" is what Alan Kay said about Linux [1], he invented the personal computer.

My 1987-1997 ISP was based on several different Unix running on Apple, probably long before you where born.

Apple built several supercomputers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmsIZUuBoQs

[2] Founder School Session: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o

trueno• 3 months ago

Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?

i dont think anyone asks this question in good faith, so it may not even be worth answering. see:

I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.

yea fwiw macs own for multi-target deployments. i spin up a gazillion containers in whatever i need. need a desktop? arm native linux or windows installations in utm/parallels/whatever run damn near native speed, and if im so inclined i can fully emulate x86/64 envs. dont run into needing to do that often, but the fact that i can without needing to bust out a different device owns. speed penalty barely even matter to me, because ive got untold resources to play around with in this backpack device that literally gets all day battery. spare cores, spare unified mem, worlds my oyster. i was just in win xp 32bit sp2 few weeks ago using 86box compiling something in a very legacy dependent visual studio .net 7 environment that needed the exact msvc-flavored float precision that was shipping 22 years ago, and i needed a fully emulated cpu running at frequencies that was going to make the compiler make the same decisions it did 22 years ago. never had to leave my mac, didnt have to buy some 22 year old thinkpad on ebay, this thing gave me a time machine into another era so i could get something compiled to spec. these techs arent heard of, but its just one of many scenarios where i dont have to leave my mac to get something done. to say its a swiss army knife is an understatement. its a swiss army knife that ships with underlying hardware specs to let you fan out into anything.

for development i have never been blocked on macos in the apple silicon era. i have been blocked on windows/linux developing for other targets. fwiw i use everything, im loyal to whoever puts forth the best thing i can throw my money at. for my professional life, that is unequivocally apple atm. when the day comes some other darkhorse brings forth better hardware ill abandon this env without a second thought. i have no tribalistic loyalties in this space, i just gravitate towards whoever presents me with the best economic win that has the things im after. we havent been talking about itunes for like a decade.

Aurornis• 3 months ago

Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?

This is one of those comments that is so far away from reality that I can’t tell if it’s trolling.

To give an honest answer: Using Macs for serious development is very common. At bigger tech companies most employees choose Mac even when quality Linux options are available.

I’m kind of interested in how someone could reach a point where they thought macs were not used for software development for 20 years.

obilgic• 3 months ago

Can this work with lume as well? Currently it has a similar limitation.

czk2• 3 months ago

it should, lume is a thin wrapper around Apple's Virtualization.framework as i understand it

Khalid_nowaf• 3 months ago

I’m very curious, why did Apple put such a limitation?

cluckindan• 3 months ago

Probably to prevent a single hardware system from being used to run an online identity farm.

mschuster91• 3 months ago

Doesn't make too much sense, the VMs don't get unique hardware identifiers that one could (ab)use for spamming iMessage.

ralph842• 3 months ago

Because their business model is to sell tightly integrated hardware and software as a package. The hardware sales fund the software development. They don't want people who haven't bought the hardware using the software.

benoau3• 3 months ago

Yeah but the "hardware" in that sense is almost entirely iPhone and iPhone-adjacent, Mac is a trailing 4th- or 5th-place line of business... maybe 6th.

moondev5• 3 months ago

The VM limit only applies to the number of macOS VMs launched from macOS itself.

My 2018 mac mini officially supports VMware ESXi to be installed directly on the hardware and virtualize any number of macOS machines

Funny enough I can even launch more than 2 macOS vms on my framework chromebook with qemu + KVM from the integrated Linux terminal.

driverdan• 3 months ago

MacOS is full of these anti-owner decisions. They want full control over your experience for their benefit.

czk2• 3 months ago

starting with M3+ you can use Hypervisor.framework/Virtualization.framework to spin up nested VMs.

it would be amusing if that bypassed the limit.

jonnrb2• 3 months ago

Lol with 2 VMs per VM you can do an infinite VM linked list where each macOS hosts a "guest" and a "next host". I'm too lazy to test this out. Any takers?

colechristensen4• 3 months ago

I think it's a little funny that my response is "no I'm not wasting my weekly tokens on that, it's not a good enough bit"

bradfitz• 3 months ago

IIRC, that's only for Linux guests that can nest. macOS can only one level deep. That is: you can't have a macOS guest (running on the Apple hardware host) make its own macOS guest.

ab_testing• 3 months ago

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 .

dghlsakjg• 3 months ago

Since when are users in this place shy about bashing Apple?

Plenty of hate out there of apple alongside the love.

Barbing3• 3 months ago

In the very same comments sometimes, those frustrating geniuses

hparadiz3• 3 months ago

What love? I think this is bullshit.

matheusmoreira5• 3 months ago

HN is not one person. I'm very happy to hate on all of them. I see what you mean though. I've given up on getting normal people to care, but seeing programmers who are absolutely smart enough to run their own Linux system on computers they actually own actively choose not to do so is very disconcerting.

AussieWog932• 3 months ago

seeing programmers who are absolutely smart enough to run their own Linux system on computers they actually own actively choose not to do so is very disconcerting.

I run macOS because Apple understands that QA testing is something of actual importance, and designing yet another package manager is not.

I do spin up Linux every now and again to see if it's good yet, and always walk away.

Why do documents print at ~50dpi on my network printer?

Why does the system simply not wake up ~20% of the time when I open my laptop's lid?

Why do I have to unplug and reconnect my USB WiFi Dongle every hour or so when the internet randomly drops out?

Why does the system stop recognising my USB SD Card reader occasionally, forcing me to hard reboot the system?

Why is the audio distorted over HDMI when I enable HDR?

Why does Kodi only detect a refresh rate of 30Hz when the system itself has no issues seeing that the monitor is 60Hz?

All of these are real problems that real users have had, but instead of solving them the Linux development community instead chooses to devote their time and resources navel gazing about systemd alternatives or creating a fragile AUR package for software that already has a sensible and officially supported distribution method.

senderista• 3 months ago

I use a Macbook for work and do all my development via ssh on remote Linux instances. Each OS is doing what it does best. I last tried a Linux laptop for development in 2020 and my conclusion was the same as in 2010: never again for at least a decade. I have better things to do than fix broken drivers and curse at shitty trackpads.

monocularvision• 3 months ago

Someday I may be able to retire this link, but today is not that day: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

toobulkeh• 3 months ago

I’ve been looking for this for forever. Finally, the right label.

tomhow• 3 months ago

Please avoid these kinds of sneers that characterize the whole community as being united in “hate” or “love” for any particular company or technology.

HN is a diverse global community and its views about most topics form a normal distribution, and most people here are able to form nuanced opinions that consider the positives and negatives in all these topics. This kind of “very funny” swipe relies on a caricature that's easy to portray if you focus on the loudest voices on one side of any discussion but falls away if you make the effort to read the discussions in depth.

edude03• 3 months ago

IIRC you can just turn off sip and set the boot argument that controls it without a custom kernel

urbandw311er• 3 months ago

This feels like an underrated comment if true

rayiner• 3 months ago

It’s crazy that you can compile a custom kernel and it’ll boot and the GUI will run.

jadar• 3 months ago

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.

dvrp• 3 months ago

Seems Mykola Grymalyuk started working at Apple 2 years after this blog post. You either die a hero..

mrweasel• 3 months ago

Apple has a 2 VM limit?

indigomm• 3 months ago

2 MacOS VMs due to licencing. You can run as many VMs with other guest OSs as you want.

erichocean• 3 months ago

Another limitation: only five active user accounts (with UIs) per machine.

Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

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