michael-s/linux_vm_on_macos

Setup steps to get an ARM64 Ubuntu VM running on an Apple Silicon, Apple OS host

linux_vm_on_macos

Setup steps to get an ARM64 Ubuntu VM running on an Apple Silicon, Apple OS host

I set this up because it took me longer than I would have liked to figure out from various websites.

As far as I know all of the compiled information is public domain and does not violate any licenses.

Before You Start

You need:

1. A MacOS device running an M1 or newer processor.
2. QEMU installed on the MacOS device. (I recommend using brew, so installation would be brew install qemu.)
3. The file QEMU_EFI.fd for aarch64/ARM64. I had a Linux server available so I did sudo apt install qemu-efi-aarch64 and then copied /usr/share/qemu-efi-aarch64/QEMU_EFI.fd to the directory with these files.
4. A Linux ARM64/aarch64 installer ISO.

To Use

Modify the install_vm.sh script to change the disk image name and size, if necessary. Also change the referenced Linux installation .iso file.

Then do ./install_vm.sh to run the installation.

NOTE: at times, QEMU will display "Display is not available on screen". That could mean everything is busted, but it could also mean you just need to wait. Give it one to two minutes to see if anything happens before closing out QEMU and trying again.

After you've run through the installer to set up your VM, you can shut it down. Then ./run_vm.sh will run it.

Note that I used output redirection on the QEMU commands so that your terminal doesn't get taken over by QEMU. That's the >/dev/null 2>&1 & at the end. The >/dev/null redirects the standard output (stdout) to get rid of it. The 2>&1 redirects the standard error output (stderr) to stdout, so it's eliminated too. And the final & runs the process in the background.

If your commands are erroring out and you need to see the output, remove the whole >/dev/null 2>&1 & and try again.

SSH

I have the command set to map port 5022 on the host to 22 on the VM, so you can do ssh -p 5022 localhost to ssh to your VM (if you set up an SSH server on your VM).