Apple built Virtio drivers directly into macOS to solve device support for Apple silicon VMs, replacing the traditional third-party model.
Key Takeaways
Apple’s Virtualisation framework uses Virtio, a standard I/O abstraction layer, meaning device support lives in macOS itself, not in VMware or Parallels.
CPU single-core VM performance is ~94% of native; GPU Metal scores ~92%; multi-core is capped by allocated core count, not overhead.
macOS guests are limited to two simultaneous VMs by macOS enforcement; App Store apps fail in VMs due to missing store credential signing.
iCloud and iCloud Drive support requires both host and guest running Sequoia 15.0 or later; upgraded VMs from earlier macOS still lack it.
Rosetta 2 works inside macOS VMs to run 64-bit Intel apps, and will remain useful after the host drops Rosetta support in macOS 28.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters flagged that shared clipboard support between macOS guest and host is still unreliable in practice, making it a notable real-world friction point despite Virtio’s theoretical coverage.
A commenter added useful context: Apple’s open-source container support is built on the same Virtualisation framework, making it a more sandboxed alternative to Docker on Apple silicon.
There is disagreement on UTM’s mode of operation: the article implies UTM is emulation-only, but commenters sought clarification on whether UTM can also leverage the hypervisor for Windows ARM.
Notable Comments
@w10-1: notes VM launch times are fast enough for serverless use cases, and macOS guests support snapshot restore while Linux guests do not.
