Support for Podman (X86 containers) and KVM (x86 VMs) on Mac Mini M2 pro

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Support for Podman (X86 containers) and KVM (x86 VMs) on Mac Mini M2 pro

I have used a Mac for more years than I wish to count, and love the environment, but in RW I support a great deal of X86 infrastructure. I am considering the new Mac Mini M2 pro, but I need to be able to use podman for x86 containers and KVM for x86 VMs (both Fedora and Debian OS). Is this possible natively, and if not what solution is available to replicate this environment? My alternate choice is the AMD Ryzen 9, for about the same money.

iPad mini 5, iPadOS 17

Posted on Jan 9, 2024 5:40 PM

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Answer 1

Jan 10, 2024 5:19 AM in response to Sky-757

The Apple Silicon Macs can only run ARM64 Windows11 and Linux distros in Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion . While the ARM64 version of Windows11 had an x64 translator (not sure the translator will work for x86 code) the bigger issue would be drivers. Any hardware drivers must be built for ARM64 and there are not many out there. Hardware drivers cannot be run in a translator.

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Answer 2

Rudegar

Level 10

180,696 points

Jan 9, 2024 11:48 PM in response to Sky-757

the best of my knowledge then virtual machines (vmware, virtualbox parallels) only support arm based windows and linux distributions, anything else would be more of a emulator which would likely not perform very well

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Answer 3

Sky-757 Author

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4 points

Jan 10, 2024 8:22 PM in response to woodmeister50

Thanks for the quick reply. I was unaware of how far the ARM support had progressed, I am a bit disappointed, and I still love my MAC, but it looks like I have an AMD Ryzen processor in my future. For the foreseeable future, it looks like X86 will dominate the processor market and my paycheck.

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Answer 4

Sky-757 Author

Level 1

4 points

Jan 10, 2024 8:32 PM in response to Rudegar

Thanks for your quick reply. I was aware of parallels and VMWare, but I had not seriously thought about the lack of hardware drivers to bridge the gap between x86 and ARM64. It looks like the ARM world is in the same position that Linux was in 20 years ago; there is a lot of back end driver ground to cover.

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Support for Podman (X86 containers) and KVM (x86 VMs) on Mac Mini M2 pro

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