Virtual Machines for lightweight virtualisation on Apple silicon Macs rely on sparse files. Here are tips to ensure they stay small and don’t explode to full size.
virtualisation
Refactored for a smoother experience and with control over shared folders, Viable beta 7 now has a sandboxed and locked-down sibling ViableS, ideal for research.
It’s a fair and simple question: how much free space is needed to update Ventura from 13.0 to 13.1? Is it 2.53, 12.97, 13.22, 13.56 or 14 GB?
Step-by-step guide to installing, configuring and using a Ventura 13.1 virtual machine on an Apple silicon Mac.
Rosetta 2 is key feature for the transition to Apple silicon, and is also available to run Intel x86_64 binaries in virtual macOS and Linux (in Ventura).
Now feature-complete with support for shared folders with the host Mac, and everything is in place for Rosetta 2 translation of x86_64 binaries within the VM.
Now fully supports shared folders, on Ventura hosts running Ventura in a VM. This gives access to faster storage, and to iCloud Drive as well.
Just 4 cores and 16 GB of memory were used for the virtual machine to run Xcode and build apps successfully, but only for local testing.
Writing to the Data volume in a VM is dismally slow. Is using shared storage any quicker? What happens when you copy a VM to an external SSD, or to another Mac?
Some threads are set to run in the background, and get allocated to the E cores. Could you run them in a VM, and effectively promote them to run on P cores instead?
The Eclectic Light Company 