Microverse

Microverse is a thin virtualization app for running macOS guest virtual machines on M1/Apple Silicon (arm64) processors, achieved with Apple's Virtualization.framework.

Note that this does not do any emulation—the virtual machines run on the same hardware as the host machine (and therefore have the same architecture). This is particularly useful to create sandbox environments with minimal performance impact.

Requirements

This project makes use of APIs from the macOS 12 (Monterey) beta.

macOS 11 (Big Sur) is unsupported.

Known limitations

For installing into the VM, only macOS 12 (Monterey) ipsw files are known to work.

There's a known issue where the App Store cannot be contacted from within a VM. Any applications you want to run will need to be downloaded from the web, or imported into the VM using a disk image in UDRW format (see man hdiutil for details).

For other known issues, please see the GitHub issues list.

License and credit

Released under the MIT license.

I'm indebted to @KhaosT' MacVM and SimpleVM projects for demonstrating Virtualization.framework usage.