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Category: VM

QEMU Windows VM on M1 Mac

2021-07-25

This very helpful post by GitHub user niw explains how to use QEMU to run a Windows virtual machine on an M1 Mac.
Currently, I've only got a VirtualBox VM on an old 2012 Mac mini (Intel Core i5-3210M), which is just painfully slow. With help from the post linked above, I can now run a much more usable VM on my M1 MacBook Air.

The post is very detailed and helpful, but I thought I'd add a couple of things I stumbled over:

  • The version of QEMU available on Homebrew (6.0.0 at the time of writing) does not work on macOS 11.1 and above due to a bug.
  • Downloading and compiling QEMU 6.1.0 is not an option either, patches are needed to support Apple's Hypervisor framework.
  • For some reason, the QEMU command-line-interface does not work with relative paths. That was a major headache before I noticed.
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