[solved] How to get a virtual Gentoo on newer Macbooks?

Gentlenoob · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2008 Posts: 72

Dear all,

I got a new Macbook at work with an M3-CPU. Having not paid too much attention, it came as an unpleasant surprise that it's not as easy as on old Intel-Macbooks to run a virtualized Gentoo. Virtualbox, which would have been my 1st choice, doesn't seem to really support the new Mac architecture very well. I could finally boot into the amd64-iso with some old'ish, arcane VB-beta, but it's terribly slow, since only emulated, if I understand correctly. Arm64 support doesn't seem to be available at all.

Any hints, suggestions or success stories - preferably low-cost - on how to get a virtualized Gentoo running on newer Macbooks?

Many thanks,
Ralph

gentoo_ram · Posted: Wed May 29, 2024 9:02 pm Post subject:

ARM64 (AArch64) support is available.

Gentlenoob · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2008 Posts: 72

thanks a lot for confirming that Gentoo runs well in Parallels. Pricing starts here around 100 € per year, which I have to admit looks a bit forbidding for my use case of having just an occasional fallback solution for stuff I'm more familiar with under Linux. Will have to think about it some more ...

Cheers, Ralph

Koyan · n00b Joined: 07 Nov 2014 Posts: 32

VMWare Fusion is a possibility as well, and it's free for personal use.

gentoo_ram · Posted: Thu May 30, 2024 5:23 pm Post subject:

Yeah, Parallels is kinda expensive. But I don't mind paying for quality software. They have a slick product that works really well. They've been releasing updates almost every month. And if you want to play around with Ubuntu they make it really easy to install with essentially one-click install and you're off and going. Same for Windows if you want to go there.

The other interesting thing is I remember in the past running Linux under x86 VMs. Even if the guest machine was idle there seemed to be quite a bit of CPU load on the host machine. Under Parallels and ARM, there's almost no load on the host when the guest is idle. Seems to be a lot more efficient. I put 12 CPUs in my Gentoo guest which matches up with the number of performance cores on my M3 Max. When Gentoo is cranking doing compiles, only the 12 performance cores are going on the host. The remaining 4 cores are not really utilized. Pretty amazing.

Gentlenoob · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2008 Posts: 72

just to follow up, I'm trying out VMware Fusion for personal use now.

The registration process was unusually slow with the passcode arriving only after about 30 min. Trying to boot into Gentoo for the 1st time, it seemed that the default RAM size of the VM was too low. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8824260.html?sid=e23e1b3728c9c9e0588f6f4202c42aae pointed me to the right direction.

So it looks as if I'm now able to sucessfully boot into 'install-arm64-minimal-20240602T232249Z.iso' in reasonable time. Keyboard and touchpad seem to work in console mode. Let's see how far I'll get.

Thanks again,
Ralph

flysideways · Guru Joined: 29 Jan 2005 Posts: 491

I have an M1 Max Macbook Pro with Gentoo vm's in both VMWare and UTM. The VMWare is the better of the two for me. UTM used to and may still have issues accessing certain usb drive products.