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

kylec

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.

RestartKernel

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

obilgic

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

Khalid_nowaf

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

czk

starting with M3+ you can use Hypervisor.framework/Virtualization.framework to spin up nested VMs. it would be amusing if that bypassed the limit.

ab_testing

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 .

edude03

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

rayiner

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

jadar

> 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

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