Docs · Guests

macOS guests

Running macOS inside macOS — what Apple allows, what it does not, and why this is the one thing most alternatives cannot do.

macOS guests run on Virtualization.framework, and they run there permanently. Apple's accelerated path is not reproducible outside its own framework, so the 1VM engine will never host a macOS guest.

This is also the capability most competing tools on Apple silicon simply do not have. VMware Fusion documents ARM macOS guests as unsupported; VirtualBox and the container-focused tools do not offer them at all.

1vm macos images        # cached restore images
1vm macos download      # fetch the latest this Mac can virtualize
1vm create test --guest macos --restore-image <path-or-build>

What works

  • Restore images fetched straight from Apple
  • Full graphics acceleration and trackpad
  • Shared folders over virtiofs

What does not

  • More than two running at once. This is Apple's limit, enforced by the framework rather than by this app, so it is not something 1VMTool can raise.
  • Signing into some Apple services, which decline to run in a virtual machine.
  • Shared clipboard. There is no supported guest-agent channel for a macOS guest.

What it is good for

Testing an installer, a migration or an OS upgrade on your only Mac is how you lose an afternoon. A macOS guest plus a snapshot turns that into a loop: take the snapshot, run the risky thing, restore, repeat. Restoring costs a fraction of a millisecond, so the number of times you can try is not the constraint.

Budget about 20 GB for the restore image plus whatever the machine itself uses.