What are the advantages of the new Virtualization Framework in macOS Big Sur?

Compare Virtualization Framework and Hypervisor Framework

Image from Apple

Apple Virtualization Framework allows us to create and run virtual machines (based on Linux-based OS). This new framework was introduced in the macOS Big Sur as an alternative for the Hypervisor Framework.

By using these high-level APIs offers by Virtualization Framework, unlike the Hypervisor Framework, you can easily spin up a VM using a High-level programming language like Swift. The Hypervisor Framework is low level and it is very hard to work with its APIs (C-based APIs) but the new Virtualization Framework’s APIs are based on Swift and Objective-C.

You can take look at this great GitHub repository to find out more about those high-level APIs that calling in the Swift codes:

GitHub - KhaosT/SimpleVM: Sample code for Virtualization framework

Actually, the Virtualization Framework is just a new layer on top of the old Hypervisor Framework to offer simpler APIs for creating VMs.

Main Advantages:

• High-level APIs for creating and managing VMs
• Supports the Virtio specification to define standard interfaces for many device types
• Portable between both x64 and ARM64

Virtualization Framework in the Docker

There is an experimental feature in the Docker Desktop for macOS Big Sur that uses this feature, but it is an experimental feature and I think we should wait until it will be stable. For now, if you enable it, you may have network problems and bad disk performance but according to some tests it uses less RAM in comparison to Hyperkit.

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