Support Virtualbox on Apple Silicon

[lindsaymarkward]

As of September 2024, Virtualbox 7.1+ now works on Apple Silicon - See the release notes.

The current Vagrantfile checks for ARM and uses parallels or docker instead of virtualbox. Lines 232+ for me:

# if Arm default to docker then parallels
if Etc.uname[:version].include? 'ARM64'
  if vvv_is_parallels_present()
    defaults['provider'] = 'parallels'
  else
    defaults['provider'] = 'docker'
  end
end

By the way, that comment is incorrect - "docker then parallels" is backwards.

I've tried commenting that section out, but I still get:

Bringing machine 'default' up with 'docker' provider...

I can get it to run with docker on my M1 MacBookPro, but I'd like to use Virtualbox again now that it works.

What changes would I need to make to the Vagrantfile and/or other files to get this to work?

Thanks!

[tomjn]

Biggest problem here is you'll need a vagrant box built for virtualbox on arm64, otherwise the best you can get is the x86 Intel box for Virtualbox. (that sentence was a bit of a mouthfull).

Although right now, nothing prevents you setting the provider and box entirely using config.yml, vagrantfile changes shouldn't be necessary. Using this route you could even make it use providers and boxes we've never heard of, though there's no guarantee the provisioners will still work.

I've tried commenting that section out, but I still get:

Once you start a machine vagrant will try to stick to it, so if you created a docker based VM you would need to destroy it before you could try changing providers.

[tomjn]

The boxes we use are from the chef/bento github repo, bento/ubuntu-20.04 but it looks like the arm64 version doesn't have a virtualbox build https://portal.cloud.hashicorp.com/vagrant/discover/bento/ubuntu-20.04-arm64. You could look at other Ubuntu 20 boxes and try those out to see how far you get, or try and help out with the bento project to get an arm virtualbox box published

At least with the bento box you're guaranteed it'll be 99.99% likely to work as is

HashiCorp Cloud Platform

[tomjn]

For reference something like this:

vm_config:
  .....
  provider: virtualbox
  box: bento/ubuntu-20.04

But, I would expect this to fail since there is no arm64 version of that box. It's possible Oracle were smart enough to make it use rosetta 2 in this situation but the performance might not be the same. This does allow you to look for a replacement box though and if you find one let me know.

Here's the box we use on the box catalog: https://portal.cloud.hashicorp.com/vagrant/discover/bento/ubuntu-20.04, we use a pinned version for Parallels so it finds the arm build, but I don't believe Bento have any arm virtualbox boxes yet. A box_version: ... parameter is possible in VVV 3.14.1 that might help there if you come across one.

[tomjn]

Support for macOS on Apple silicon: An installation package is provided for Apple silicon hosts and provides support to run Oracle Linux for Arm VMs.

I wouldn't count on x86 emulation, but it looks like some Bento boxes do have arm64 virtualbox builds, e.g. https://portal.cloud.hashicorp.com/vagrant/discover/bento/fedora-latest. It's inconsistent as their debian 11 boxes had a release 2 days ago too but there's no arm64 debian 11 box. It may be a while before that changes as the maintainer is going through a lot of bugfixing to make releases happen.

HashiCorp Cloud Platform