Early technology preview of x86_64 emulation

Mikhail Ushakov

Mikhail Ushakov

Problem solver
Hello!
We're thrilled to announce an early technology preview of the x86_64 emulation feature that allows you to run some x86_64 VMs on Apple silicon Macs via the Parallels emulator. More details are provided in KB https://kb.parallels.com/130217.
We'll appreciate you sharing your thoughts, issues, use cases or overall feedback.

Thank you!
 
Hi Parallels Support Team,
great to have that new feature! As I am a .NET developer, I still need x86 based windows for legacy software.
As you can read in the release notes, the performance is not the best. What can we expect here? Will this change significantly in the course of future releases, or will it only change insignificantly with x86 emulation?
 
Hi, i have tried with a Windows 10 X64 vm and a Linux one, with a mac mini m4 pro, the vm starts and immediately stops. I have uploaded the crash report, id number 480643524.
Manlio.
 
This can be useful for situations where a Linux distribution does not provide the same amount of packages for aarch64 , for example I was unable to move an appliance from Ubuntu 16.04 x86_64 due to some dependencies that could not be resolved.

I think it would be good also to be able to run pre Apple Silicon releases of macOS too for example macOS Catalina which is the last version of macOS that can share over AFP to legacy clients in a sort of museum setting.

I look forward to seeing how this develops!
 
Hi Parallels Support Team,
I am very keen to test the beta for x86 emulation.
I have successfully created an intel x86 pvm in Terminal, using the command prlctl create <vm_name> -d <distro> --cpu-type x86, and pointed it to a Windows 10 22H2 iso using the command prlctl set <vm_name> --device-set cdrom0 --image <x86_iso_path> --connect .
However when I attempt to start the vm with the command prlctl start <vm_name> I get the following error: Failed to get VM config: The virtual machine could not be found. The virtual machine is not registered in the virtual machine directory on your Mac.
(Also of interest, the vm shows in control center, and I can right-click and use Start using emulator, but when the vm runs, it just says Stopping and crashes with a critical error. What could be happening here?) Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
 
Mikhail Ushakov said:
Hello!
We're thrilled to announce an early technology preview of the x86_64 emulation feature that allows you to run some x86_64 VMs on Apple silicon Macs via the Parallels emulator. More details are provided in KB https://kb.parallels.com/130217.
We'll appreciate you sharing your thoughts, issues, use cases or overall feedback.

Thank you!
Click to expand...
This is great news for me. My use case involves connecting a USB device so I will keep my fingers crossed that this functionality eventually gets added. So happy to hear this is in progress.
 
AndersL6 said:
What I can see is that this only applies to emulating Windows and Linux, but is it possible to emulate Mojave and run 32-bit Mac apps?
Click to expand...
I tried a copy of a macOS Catalina machine without success. Parallels Desktop would not start the VM with type macOS so I tried changing that to linux, I then had to remove USB&Bluetooth, camera and sound form hardware but then I couldn't get past the parallels boot menu. Because booting in the Mac way does not seem workable we can't run intel macOS releases, but perhaps creating a virtual Hackintosh with some sort of bootstrap might work.
 
I moved a number of Windows11 machines from my Intel based Mac to my MacBook Pro M4 and all of them suffer the immediate stops that others are reporting. I have sent in reports for each of the machines hoping that will help. Excited to bring these over and for me only reference in case I happened to have missed something during the rebuild on the new machine of these systems. If this continues to advance however, being able to emulate some of the older OS'es for certain situations would be helpful.

Thanks for starting the work on this, hoping it gets to be usable!
 
Same issues for me.
Having a brand new Mac Book Pro M4, moving two different VMs from Intel to the new Mac, both the VMs stops immediately and PD ask me to send the report (I sent many).

Very interesting feature, great job Parallels! I just hope I can get this working ... with upcoming releases.
Thank you.
 
Have a similar problems overhere with the emulation of x86 PVMs. In the end, (conclusion) it did not work at all.

A windows 11 (x86) PVM does not show a emulation option at all. A MacOS 10.14 (x86) PVM shows option to emulate, but selection of this option is (while showed) is not possible. So in all-cases I can not get the Parallels Pro version do the emulation. Unfortunately since this is a very promising option.

And, I support the idea that this feature can not be limited to the Pro version only, should be supported (if it works) by the standard (perpetual) license also.
 
SpencerL3 said:
This is great news for me. My use case involves connecting a USB device so I will keep my fingers crossed that this functionality eventually gets added. So happy to hear this is in progress.
Click to expand...
The software from my employer only works on Intel or AMD processors. :-( So the only thing missing for me, in order to be able to use Parallels with emulated Intel processor, is the support of USB devices (as we use SignoPad to sign documents). Could you please state if support of USB devices will be added?
 
This announcement is music to my ears. I know that the first few rounds of technology preview will likely be riddled with issues for real-world use cases, but this is a great step forward. Initial "playing around" with the feature on an M1 and M2 macbook air looks very promising. Looking forward to the more mature technology and hoping it will be a long-life product feature.
 
Upgraded to 20.2.1 today and was very happy to be able to run Windows 10 on my new M4 Mac. I look forward to a version that lets me install Linux from an ISO image.
 
This is very good news as we use Mac at our company, but also a lot of special SW that require full x86 support, especially
when it comes to drivers. So USB support would make a huge difference for us when it comes to continue using Mac and Parallels.
 
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