Ask HN: Why is virtualization still not solved?

Sounds like an Apple problem?

Virtualization is definitely solved for your use case on Linux. Personally I use virt-manager for the UI but its all qemu underneath AFAIK.

It is an Apple problem. Virtualization has been solved for good, even the cheapest consumer hardware has virtualization support since at least a decade by now and I sometimes run virtual machines on a 4GB netbook with an Atom processor just for fun.

I am running 100% automatically deployed/configured Debian desktops on Apple hardware for several years now, Intel and M1 CPUs. (100% reproducible is another level and another story).

Right now and for most of the past years I am running VMWare Fusion, which works with the features I need as long as you don't update macOS immediately after a new major revision was released. (Apple messing up internal APIs nearly every time.)

Sometimes in the past I also used the QEMU version provided by macPorts, and the only issue I had was with my non English keyboard, if you use a US keyboard layout you shouldn't have any issues at all.

Still, I am surprised, you seem to imply that you need to provision a new VM because of trouble with TypeScript/VSCode? Not sure what you are doing, or what plugins in VSCode you are running, but that I have to provision an entirely new VM to solve such kind of problems never happened to me and I haven't heard about that in my environment (big company, quite a lot of VSCode and TypeScript users).

The problem is that the whole virtualization situation was left as an afterthought in the Apple ecosystem, and it got worse during the Apple Silicon transition years.

Just now things are starting to catch up, but there's still a wide gap in features; Apple Virtualization Framework is still very limited. And a personal limitation I hit recently, no USB4/Thunderbolt passthrough anywhere, not in UTM (which uses AVF), not in VMWare either.

Also remember the final Apple Silicon version of VMWare supporting M1/M2 wasn't available until November 2022 (it was a tech preview before), while all the Broadcom situation was ensuing. And I think only as of 2024 it runs smoothly. So far it's still the most reliable for desktop Linux VMs for me. Windows 11 for ARM runs very well too, and it does x86 emulation transparently, even 2010s games run well.

FWIW, I've used VMWare Fusion on Mac OS for years (and their Workstation product on Linux/Windows since 1999). It has worked well for me so far. VirtualBox used to be not great on MacOS with multiple CPUs and lots of interrupts - I noticed problems when moving from a Mac laptop with a spinning HDD to NVMe SSDs. The slow inter-processor interrupts (IPIs) and some related contention caused concurrent IOs to get very slow with fast SSDs with VirtualBox (back when still running on an Intel Mac with VMWare kernel module). In fact, I could get more IOPS out of the VM with fio when giving just 1-2 vCPUs to the VM, vs 4-8 vCPUs.

I haven't tested VirtuaBox on latest Mac versions as I'm happy with VMWare Fusion (also on ARM M1/M2 machines). The product is still good, regardless of Broadcom's business shenanigans.

Edit: If Parallels works for you, but only the SSH terminal sessions get stuck, maybe the "shared network" connection drops your connections for some reason. Before diving too deep into troubleshooting this across layers, you could try out the usual suspects workaround, setting SSH TCP keepalive. I have this for some connections in my ~/.ssh/config file:

TCPKeepalive yes

ServerAliveInterval 30

Are you looking to run Debian desktop or server?

Have you tried using Colima [1] with a Docker volume, instead of all those heavyweight tools?

[1] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

Debian has in-progress Apple M1 support:

https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Bananas

Maybe try the open source qemu support for the macOS Hypervisor.framework (HVF)?

https://www.arthurkoziel.com/qemu-ubuntu-20-04/ https://www.arthurkoziel.com/running-virt-manager-and-libvir...

Qubes (Xen). It's poorly-documented and doesn't offer a simple-enough, useful devX/UX. This would be the best starting point.

Apple fails to offer true, useful nested virtualization.

Canonical (Ubuntu) is run by unreasonable people.

VMware ESXi... for servers and Brocade sucks.

You didn’t explain why you wanted to use debian, you don’t have to, but there are a lot of x86 based laptops out there that will run various linux distros so I wonder why you’re on a Mac to start with? Employer choice and not yours?

You mention Typescript which I’ll assume means some sort of web development, one thing to maybe consider is looking at https://omakub.org/ for inspiration on hardware choices and a setup. I don’t use it but was looking at it recently out of curiousity (I do Rails so thats how I’m aware of DHH and him leaving Apple HW).

I use a MacBook Air M1 as my dev laptop, and I just wanted to have a reproducible dev environment running Debian.

Computers are cattle not pets and the simplest technical solution is a laptop that supports Debian. A Thinkpad for example.

Removing a dependency on VM’s would be a reasonable engineering strategy.

On Windows I've had good experiences running Linux under virtualization. Right now my RSS reader and Image sorter are running under WSL2 with no problems. I used to use VirtualBox and it worked pretty well.

There is also a simple macOS Hypervisor.framework wrapper here:

https://github.com/evansm7/vftool

8GB RAM and 4 performance cores?