UTM Virtual Machines 4.2.5

April 25, 2023

UTM is a full featured system emulator and virtual machine host for iOS and macOS. It is based off of QEMU. In short, it allows you to run Windows, Linux, and more on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad

UTM employs Apple’s Hypervisor virtualization framework to run ARM64 operating systems on Apple Silicon at near native speeds. On Intel Macs, x86/x64 operating system can be virtualized. In addition, lower performance emulation is available to run x86/x64 on Apple Silicon as well as ARM64 on Intel. For developers and enthusiasts, there are dozens of other emulated processors as well including: ARM32, MIPS, PPC, and RISC-V. Your Mac can now truly run anything.

Features:

Full system emulation (MMU, devices, etc) using QEMU
30+ processors supported including x86_64, ARM64, and RISC-V
VGA graphics mode using SPICE and QXL
Text terminal mode
USB devices
JIT based acceleration using QEMU TCG
Frontend designed from scratch for macOS 11 and iOS 11+ using the latest and greatest APIs
Create, manage, run VMs directly from your device

What’s New

Version 4.2.5:

Guest interface commands. New commands accessible from the scripting interface as well as the command line interface (utmctl) can be used to read/write files, execute commands, and list IP addresses. These commands require QEMU guest agent to be installed.
Scripting interface additions. The scripting interface now allows for creation of a new VM, configuration an existing VM, changing drive image, and more. See the documentation site for more details which includes a cheat sheet for example usage.
External read-write drive images. In QEMU, if a supported drive interface is selected (USB, Floppy, etc) along with an image type of Disk, the drive can now be marked as either read-only or read-write. This can be used as an alternative way of transferring data to and from the VM when the guest does not support SPICE or VirtFS. In AVF, support for read-write images has be fixed as well (when "read only" is unchecked in the settings).