[my123]

Note that this is about Virtualization.framework (Apple's first party VMM). OpenBSD worked on Hypervisor.framework + qemu since a very long time.

[cpach]

Good point. The naming of those frameworks is sooo confusing. IMHO, nearly impossible to not mix them up.

[carlm42]

My mental model is that each of these covers a different layer of the stack, from lowest to highest:

* hypervisor-framework handles the hypervisor bits, like creating virtual machines, virtualising hardware resources, basically a C API on top of Apple's hypervisor

* virtualization-framework is a higher-level API, meant to make it easy to run a full-blown VM with an OS and hardware integration, without having to reinvent the integration with lower-level primitives that hypervisor-framework provides

* containerization-framework uses virtualization-framework to run Linux containers on macOS in microVMs.

By analogy to not mix them up, it's a bit like KVM > QEMU > containerd.

Hope this helps!

[tannhaeuser]

Out of my depth here. Is that the one Tahoe was introducing? What did it solve that was impossible before?

[m132]

Virtualization.framework was introduced in Big Sur. It builds on top of Hypervisor.framework and is essentially Apple's QEMU (in some ways quite literally, it implements QEMU's pvpanic protocol for example). Before QEMU and other VMMs gained ARM64 Hypervisor.framework support, it was the only way to run virtual machines on ARM Macs and still is the only official way to virtualize ARM macOS.

The new Tahoe framework you're probably thinking of is Containerization, which is a WSL2-esque wrapper around Virtualization.framework allowing for easy installation of Linux containers.

[atmosx]

Oh good point. I mixed it up, UTM is using qemu under hood, but as someone mentioned now OpenBSD snapshot boots with qemu seemlesly. It's still virtualised though.

[irusensei]

It can also use the apple native hypervisor.