Apple silicon Macs support lightweight macOS and SteamOS virtualisation

New developments in lightweight virtualisation for Apple silicon Macs are enabling more efficient ways to run guest operating systems. The app Vimy provides a streamlined method for running macOS virtual machines, allowing users to launch them directly from the Finder without opening a full virtualisation environment.

Simultaneously, a project named steamac has successfully implemented Valve’s official ARM64 SteamOS build within a lightweight microVM on Apple silicon. This setup uses the Hypervisor framework and libkrun to boot SteamOS, utilizing Proton to handle Windows games via the Metal API. The system employs a complex graphics stack where Proton translates DirectX to Vulkan, which is then passed through virtio-gpu to a Vulkan driver running on Metal. This allows SteamOS to access the Mac's GPU effectively.