The source code is here and you can compile it if you want but I just used the pre-built binary from this release though. Also, this exercise was done on a Macbook Air with M1 processor but should work with other machines with the same chip.

Remember that if you install qemu via brew, it will not work because it does not know how to talk to the new Hypervisor Framework by Apple which is needed for virtualization on M1 machines. There is a great article here about how to patch the Qemu source code and build it to get the binary but the link to the path which actually gets the job done is either broken or the patch has been deleted or it has been merged into the main branch of QEMU (which doesn’t seem to be the case). Installing Ubuntu on a machine with M1 chip I scoured the internet and put some pieces together to make it finally work. There is no single blog/tutorial which guides you on how to make a Ubuntu (preferably 20.04) VM run on the M1 machines.

There is a Parallels Desktop release in Tech Preview mode which allows you to install Ubuntu but does not allow you to set the resolution of the resulting machine beyond 1024×768 pixels. Docker is not yet fully stable (still in Tech Preview mode), there is no VMware Fusion for M1 and a lot of apps on Mac are still only targeted for x86_64 machines as of now. Installing Ubuntu on a machine with M1 chipĪt the time of writing this Blog Post, Apple Silicon’s first series of machines are out (the M1 SoC chip equipped MacBook Air, Macbook Pro 13-inch and Mac Mini).

Qemu m1