UTM
Runs Windows, Linux and other systems in a virtual machine on a Mac, iPhone or iPad.
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1 more ways to get UTM
Package managers
- Homebrew
brew install --cask utm
About UTM
UTM is a QEMU front end designed for Apple platforms. On a Mac it uses Hypervisor.framework for hardware-accelerated virtualisation of same-architecture guests, and can boot macOS guests on macOS 12 and later. It also does full system emulation of more than thirty processor architectures including x86_64, ARM64 and RISC-V, so an Intel Windows image runs on Apple Silicon, slowly.
On iOS it is the same program with a catch: QEMU needs just-in-time compilation for speed, which iOS does not allow, so the App Store version UTM SE uses a threaded interpreter instead. That is faster than a plain interpreter and much slower than the Mac version.
Strengths
- Hardware-accelerated virtualisation on macOS through Hypervisor.framework
- Full emulation of more than thirty architectures when you need a different one
- Boots macOS guests on macOS 12 and later
- Interface designed for macOS and iOS rather than ported from elsewhere
Limitations
- Emulating a different architecture is slow
- The iOS version needs a jailbreak or a workaround for full speed
- UTM SE on the App Store is noticeably slower than the Mac version
- Graphics performance in guests is modest compared with a native install
Details
- Pricing
- Freemium · Free and open source under the Apache 2.0 licence. A paid Mac App Store listing exists purely to support development; the same build is free from the website.
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Developer
- utmapp
- Platforms
- macOS, iOS
- How it runs
- Downloadable app
- Account
- Not required
- Works offline
- Yes
- Best suited for
- Running Windows or Linux on Apple hardware without paying for Parallels
- Categories
- Virtual machines
- Last verified
- Added
- Provenance
- Selected from the TechWalrus downloads catalog (Virtualization); facts checked against the developer's own pages, 2 sources on file.
Similar software
Related functionality, not necessarily a direct replacement.
VirtualBox
The free desktop hypervisor most people start with: run Windows, Linux or BSD in a window on the machine you already have.
QEMU
The machine emulator and virtualiser that most of the Linux virtualisation stack is built on.
Quickemu
Downloads an operating system and builds a properly configured QEMU virtual machine from one short config file.
Virtual Machine Manager
The standard desktop front end for KVM on Linux, plus the command line tools that go with it.
