Creating x86/amd64 Debian10 Vagrant guest on M1 MacBook host

Question

I've been given a Vagrantfile that's normally used by Ubuntu people to create and provision a Debian 10 VirtualBox guest box for development work. They'd normally use the VirtualBox provider plugin for Vagrant.

I want to host a similar box on my M1 MacBook, which should be technically possible but is proving complicated. Many vagrant providers either don't work on Mac (or at least M1/arm Macs), or the vagrant boxes for them are "arm" ones that are arm internally, so the provisioning breaks. I need a guest Debian 10 box that's emulated x86/amd64.

QEMU & QEMU Vagrant Provider (https://github.com/ppggff/vagrant-qemu) seem the most likely to solve this problem but they need a lot of configuration and also there doesn't seem to be any QEMU Debian 10 vagrant boxes anywhere.

Has anyone been able to successfully get a setup like this working?

Answer 1

Changelogs seem to indicate VirtualBox 7.x is using the Apple Hypervisor frameworks, which does support this . Functionality is considered a developer preview and is unsupported at present, so I wouldn't suggest using it. Early versions had networking issues, but this appears to have been remediated (again according to changelogs). I've seen reports of more recent macOS versions not working in VirtualBox VMs too.

UTM, as mentioned in @tetsujin's comment above, is a user friendly GUI wrapper for QEMU. The comments on UTM's site seem to indicate it uses both the Apple frameworks and QEMU. Details are lacking though. It doesn't appear to have any APIs though according to various posts I've seen, which would make things a bit more difficult with respect to vagrant driver development should you choose to take that course. There is a command line interface though. The vagrant virtual box driver does make some use of CLI calls, so there are examples for that in the driver code should you need them.

As you indicated, you can use QEMU directly. Vagrant happens to have an official driver via libvirt, which interfaces with QEMU (this is also a developer preview, but given that it's from Hashicorp you may get more milage out of it). As you likely know there are libvirt and QEMU packages available for macOS via HomeBrew. This may, however, be less work than than community driver for a QEMU you mentioned.

There is also xhyve, which is a macOS port of BSD bhyve hypervisor that uses the Apple frameworks. There is an old vagrant plugin for xhyve, which utilizes the Apple frameworks as well. It's much more lightweight hypervisor than QEMU and should be more performant. But hasn't had a release since 2016 per Rubygems.org. You might have to do some work on this to bring it up to snuff for the latest vagrant releases. There is a vagrant plugin that leverages bhyve towards this end which you might be able to crib from if the default xyhve driver doesn't work well enough.

The TLDR here is that there are projects that might do what you want, but they're mostly in developer preview mode. As with anything YMMV with each of the above options. If you have the stomach to work on vagrant drivers, you might be able to get a stable version of what you need.

Hope this helps.

Disclosure: none of the above reflects the position or support of my employer.

Answer 2

I would be very curious if anyone has experimented with using Moby HyperKit (which is made from xhyve) with the vagrant-xhyve plugin.

In the meantime, I have had success at getting vagrant-qemu working on Macbook M1. The port forwarding currently does not work.

Essentially, this will work (source https://joachim8675309.medium.com/vagrant-with-macbook-mx-arm64-0f590fd7e48a):

# create configuration file for arm64 vm image
cat <<EOF > Vagrantfile
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "perk/ubuntu-2204-arm64"
  config.vm.provider "qemu" do |qe|
    qe.ssh_port = "50022" # change ssh port as needed
  end
end
EOF

# download and startup VM using hvf
vagrant up --provider=qemu

# log into the VM
vagrant ssh