Support Intel Macs

[aw1cks]

Is there any possibility for Intel Macs in the future? Being able to do application testing across multiple OS versions on both Intel & M1 would be killer! Right now it requires multiple physical machines.

[fkorotkov]

Unfortunately, we are bounded by what Apple's Virtualization.Framework is providing to us. We might add Intel support along the side of Linux support (#62) but I don't believe Virtualization.Framework will ever support Intel for running macOS. But I don't think we'll ever be able to run both platforms on one machine. 😪

[aw1cks]

That's a real shame! Thanks for the explanation.

[edude03]

Hm? I'm confused, @fkorotkov doesn't Virtualization.framework support both? I took a quick look at the link and it says

The Virtualization framework provides high-level APIs for creating and managing virtual machines (VM) on Apple silicon and Intel-based Mac computers

What am I misunderstanding?

[fkorotkov]

@edude03 Linux is supported for both Intel and Apple Silicon but macOS is only available on Apple Silicon. If we'll add Linux support as part of #62 we might build Tart for Intel as well.

But macOS VMs will not work on Intel because VZMacOSBootLoader is only for Apple Silicon.