On MacBook Air M1 it is extremely slow, unusable!

[eziologico]

I have tried to create some x86_64 virtual machines with Linux and Windows but it is impossible to use them as they are very slow.
I downloaded some ready-made virtual machines from the UTM site but they have the same problem.
In addition, the CPU heats up a lot reaching over 70 ° C

macOS Big Sur v11.3.1
UTM v2.0.28 (28)

[osy]

Yes that’s expected as x86_64 is being emulated.

[thedocbwarren]

Noticed IO is super slow. Not so much interacting with UI. CLIs are quick though. Not sure if it's the CPU emulation that is slow or IO drivers. Other the flip side Docker uses QEMU for emulating x86 images. They do not run painfully slow. Why does this?

[Atemu]

I'm pretty sure Docker uses user-mode emulation where the OS is native aarch64 but the app binaries are run via qemu-user; similar to how Rosetta works. This can save a lot of cycles because the kernel is native.

It's ultimately still the same qemu emulation though. You probably don't notice as much as the workloads of your local docker env is likely to be orders of magnitudes lighter than a typical desktop system.

[GuizmoFR]

I also have this issues and I notice that UTM run the VM on 1 cpu only on. my MacBook Air M1. I well configure my vm with a mx of 4 cpu but even Windows detect only 1 CPU.
Is there a way to add multicore for Win10 VM ? and the UTM use more than 1 core ?

[Jakersnell]

force multicore in vm settings, but its unstable.

[sscarduzio]

Hello from 2022 (UTM 3.0.3 beta), in my top specs M1 Max (macbook pro 14" late 2021) Ubuntu Desktop for amd64 is equally unusably slow with default settings.

I reconfigured the VM to force 4 cores and 4GB memory, now it's aaalmost usable. But programs still open slowly, including the file manager. Once they are open it's kinda ok. I suspect there's some high latency in the I/O? Not sure how to measure this though.

Any suggestion on how to speed it up?

[DJ-IRL]

okay running ubuntu x86 rn from utm gallery, only changes I've made are forcing multicore and I increased the memory from 512 to 4096.

I have to admit it's faster. but not by enough to be usable. firefox still took 90 seconds to open.

also, i didnt realize i was in the official repo lol. nice to meet ya, beautiful software overall. just having an issue w custom binaries from my professor

[sullof]

@osy It makes sense, but you should alert people about that before that they buy it.

[osy]

I believe it says multiple times in the App Store description that emulation will be slower then virtualization and there’s no gpu acceleration.

[naisanzaa]

This. If even the M1 Max is suffering, hopefully once that's solved, this will become usable for all M1's.

[Atemu]

Are those apps snaps? If yes, that startup time is (somewhat) expected.

Try using non-snap apps and/or a distro which doesn't employ snaps (basically anything but Ubuntu).

[nonarkitten]

Just adding my $0.02, running the Windows XP is very snappy, but likes to crash. Not even a BSOD, just back to BIOS boot. But performance-wise the thing runs like hot buttered toast. Windows 7 runs like hot garbage. Opening Windows Explorer can take minutes some times and gets exponentially worse the more you're doing on it. Upping the RAM and CPU core count had little impact.

[pavitrakumar78]

can anyone comment on the current performance of running x86 ubuntu on M1/M2 - no GUI, just cmd/headless?

[xybytz]

That's what it looks like for me.

[Hamath-Eltrael]

Ok, so I'm not alone at leat. But I would not call this ok or even functioning. It's probably not doable better(atm) so I'll let it slide, but I would have loved and "extremely" slow and I would not understand this level of laggynes under:

Run Intel/AMD systems like Windows® 7, Windows® XP, Ubuntu® Linux and many more, with reasonable speed (here we have to resort to emulation on Macs with an Apple chip - on Macs with an Intel chip, however, these systems are the fastest! )

-Appstore of UTM in German, translated by "google translate"

So either change the description to make it more obvious how bad it'll be, or just show a video of the performance when emulating a x86 on ARM, labeled CLEARLY.

[xybytz]

Maybe we should try VirtualBox or something. Will report speed.

[xybytz]

Or use Debian arm or ubuntu arm

[Hamath-Eltrael]

Of course, if it only ran on ARM. Only x68 sadly. That's what I need UTM for.

[smoe]

4.1.0 and x86_64 (Debian stable) on an M1 (OS X 13.0.1) is still slow - but it works, just unusable. I also tried an Debian ARM and that was very fast, though. Very excited. Just, any docker instance requesting linux/amd64 then fails with what is linux/arm64.

[pavitrakumar78]

Is there still no way to reliably develop applications for x86_64 Linux servers on M1/2/X chips?

[thedocbwarren]

you can easily cross compile with gcc. Are you writing AMD64 asm? If you are talking about Windows, Windows 11 ARM is able to run apps for AMD64 and x86. Linux ARM runs well on M1/2 Macs in a VM. You can code there. I do all the time.

[pavitrakumar78]

The servers are AMD64. I'm just writing a lot of DB-intensive applications w/ python + C-based libraries like numpy and I've seen a lot of arch. dependent dependencies for these libraries so I'm not sure if I can be 100% confident about the replicability of code behaviour when written on say, M1 and then deployed on an AMD64.

For this usecase, the only viable solution right now is running a windows ARM within M1 so that you get as close to the x86 linux as possible?

[thedocbwarren]

It sounds like it's fully doable on the M1 with that stack. I code quite a bit with high and lower level and deploy to multiple architectures. For Linux it's more about matching system (like systemd for ex.,) and any library versions than architecture unless it's written specifically for the architecture. But every case is different and I'm not sure you'd be able to do this in WSL on ARM Windows effectually.

[40P3]

I was expecting a fast install and use of the win10 today on my M1 with UTM. Did install and check WinServer2k19 few months back and also ARM win10 those were okayish, I was able to do what I want (check KMS installation etc.).
But this install, win10pro x86_64 took half a day.
And it is completely useless. The user setup were looping with OOBESETTINGSMULTIPAGE error. had to try like 5-6 times until it managed to set up a user.
x4GB and 4cores it should be more than enough for a VGA desktop user experience on a bare win10pro install.
Mind you, tried the same more than a year ago with parallels trial and it was really smooth, even the non-arm version.
This emulation is broken for sure.

P.S.: No I cannot use arm, I need native win64, because Powershell features not supporting and working with arm.

[michael-scott-howard]

On my M1 Max, tried a MINT x86 emulation and with 4 cores, 12GB RAM the emulation is still in Sept, 2023 unusable . Works just at 50 baud. Using HTOP, at the Mac OS level, UTM using just 1 of the systems 9 actually cores...

[xybytz]

I tried windows 7 and it worked fine for me.

[rkshthrmsh]

@michael-scott-howard, found this article about bumping up the number of cores. Haven't tried it yet, but I am also trying to get a solution for this issue.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/utm-running-x86-64-ubuntu-20-04-on-m1-and-the-potential-for-x86-windows.2292047/

[Github-Camper]

Windows 7 and 8.1 Build 9299 is not slow, but actually fast in my Macbook Air 2021 M1

[n10v]

Did you mean MBA 2020 or MBA 2022? I can't find MBA 2021 🤔

[Github-Camper]

oops i meant 2020, 512 storage M1

[n10v]

Last time I tried about 3 months ago on my MBA 2020 M1 with 256 GB storage and I could not install Win7, because even the installer was incredibly slow

[yakimant]

Both Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 (x86, emulation) run well Apple M2 (Macbook Air), UTM 4.45!

Here are the settings:

• 4 cores, force multiple cores
• 4Gb RAM
• X11: Switch to LXQT and Openbox
• Wayland: Sway works well with GPU Accelarateion Supported Display Card.

That's it!

UPDATE: in order to make Wayland (Sway) to work properly (without glitches and fast) I had to switch video to one of the -gl options. Bothe virtio-gpu-gl-pci and virtio-ramfb-gl work well.

[Firdausfatihul]

explain how to switch to LXQT and OpenBox

[yakimant]

sudo apt install lxqt openbox + switch session
And then set wm to openbox.

[Archie-McConchie]

I think it'll always be slow when emulating it. I have 16gbs of ram on my Mac (m2) and it is still totally unusable. However, I'm sure if you download the arm version of windows 11/10 then you'll have a much smoother time.

[ccalvocm]

Greetings @eziologico I encountered the same issue in the past, but I resolved it by virtualizing Windows 11 ARM under UTM, which runs x86_64 apps seamlessly and supports GPU acceleration perfectly. I found that neither Windows 10/11 x86_64 nor Windows 10 ARM could run x86_64 apps.