@Smith_67wrote:I understand that right now it's not possible to run a usable Intel based VM on a Mac with a M1 cpu (much to my dismay) but I'd like to know if that is likely to change at some point in the future. Is it something that could happen if software was developed to allow it to happen, or is it just something that can never physically happen because of the differences in hardware?
Virtualisation of x86 on ARM is not possible because by definition virtualisation requires the same processor architecture on the host and guest: most CPU instructions in the guest OS and applications are executed directly by the host processor.
If the guest and host have different architectures (as with x86 vs ARM), the closest you can get is if the host implements a software emulation of the full instruction set of the guest CPU, interpreting each instruction as it is executed. This is a lot slower than virtualisation.
It boils down to a question of how fast the software in the VM is expected to run. An Apple Silicon Mac can probably emulate an x86 PC running an OS from the early 2000s at a speed resembling the performance of a real PC of that era. If you want to run a modern OS and applications in the guest (say anything from the last decade) then its performance will be a lot slower than a real PC. Anything time critical will not work, and other software will be painfully slow.
The emulation may also be incomplete, e.g. it may not cover some advanced features of the processor, or some other components in the computer, so applications which depend on those won't work.
VMware have stated they are not intending to provide full x86 emulation for VMware Fusion on Apple Silicon Macs: it would require a lot of development effort and there is not likely to be a sufficient market of people willing to pay for such a feature. (Especially once you factor in the performance limitations.) Parallels and VirtualBox don't seem likely to do this either.
There is at least one existing open source emulation product (UTM) but it appears to be missing functionality and is not stable enough for serious use.
Running an ARM guest OS with x86-to-ARM code translation inside that seems a more viable solution for running arbitrary x86 applications, as this is a simpler problem to solve. Microsoft already provides an implementation of this for ARM Windows 11.
That won't help for use cases such as running older versions of macOS and Windows. For those (my main reason for using VMware Fusion since version 1), I've kept an Intel Mac running VMware Fusion, but it is no longer my primary Mac.
