What are my options for building an x86-based Linux apps on Silicone Macs?

For a few years, I've been supporting our application on three platforms - mac, linux, and windows. Whenever I needed to make those builds, I simply started Parallels and spun up the required VM, did the build, and got back out - very easy. But since Silicone Macs have come around, doing this has become a bit more unwieldy: even though nowadays I do all my work on a Silicone Mac, I had to keep my Intel Mac around - just to run Parallels and those VMs when I need to build for those architectures.

Is there any alternative that would not require me to keep that Intel Mac around? It's starting to get long in the tooth (2018 model). I'm pretty sure the Silicon-based version of Parallels can't run x86 VMs - or can it? If it emulated the x86 instruction set and was dog slow as a result, I wouldn't care since I don't need to do these builds frequently. If there is no way to do this on my Silicone Mac, I think I will have to start running those VMs on AWS.

 

There is no way to run X86 VMs on a Mac that runs on Apple Silicon.

 

I was hoping Parallels had some Rosetta-like magic up its sleeve (perhaps as a future product?) where it could do instruction-set level emulation, like Apple did when it moved from one architecture to another in the past. Oh well.