They’re everywhere: whatever you do, something somewhere will cache it. Later that can cause puzzling problems, but makes our Macs faster as a result.
VM
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.
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.
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.
In extreme cases, excessive use of swap space on an internal SSD could lead to its premature death, and the end of life for that Mac. How could you assess that?
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 