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is there an M1 virtual machine image available for linux?

5 messages · Joshua N Pritikin, Simon Urbanek, Brian Ripley

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I don't think that is feasible (assuming you mean macOS 11 arm64 system running in a VM). Note that M1 is not just the CPU, there is much tighter integration of all the components so you'd have to emulate a lot more than that and also all the Apple security components etc. in order to be able to boot macOS on an arm emulation. It is possible to run Intel macOS in a VM on an Intel Mac, because there is the pass-through to the underlying hardware for things that cannot be emulated, but I suspect that is not possible for the arm version. You can certainly run Linux in arm emulation, but I don't think you can expect macOS to work that way anytime soon.

Cheers,
Simon
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On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 03:54:12PM +1300, Simon Urbanek wrote:
OK, so how do I test my package on M1?

I've been threatened with removal from CRAN if I don't get it working.

Thank you.
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To my best knowledge the only way to test anything on M1 is to buy one. As far as I know there is no virtual solution yet. If you see one, let me know.

As for CRAN there is no official arm64 build yet - the hardware just arrived and I need to setup the nightly builds first before moving to packages. However, Brian Ripley has run a first pass over all packages to give authors chance to look at what breaks on the new architecture - it is listed on the check page in the additional checks section.
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On 15/12/2020 03:26, Simon Urbanek wrote:
(Listed as of last night European time and still being tweaked.)
Indeed.  I have only reported as 'additional issues' whose root causes 
are obvious from the logs and in the vast majority of cases could be 
fixed without access to hardware (e.g. by changing a tolerance or using 
a suggested package conditionally).