Whonix on Mac M1 (ARM) - Development Discussion

Development
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If running inside VirtualBox on Mac ARM64, could you please report a bug against systemd-detect-virt and/or fix it?

Mac M1 / ARM64 is unsupported which is stated on the wiki page. Issues should be expected.

Build documentation for supported platforms is here: Build and Update Whonix from Source Code

What’s missing? That’s the page that needs to be edited if anything is missing.

Steps for manual creation of VirtualBox settings files aren’t needed as far as I can see. The commands to run are clear from the script.

Note: This is a development forum thread. Fully automated builds are the goal.

The user support forum thread is: Whonix on Mac M1 (ARM) - User Support (still unsupported at time of writing)

Now, even if we had a script to automate VM settings on Mac, I wonder how much good it would do. It would still be messy and require a two-step build process. (Build inside Debian ARM64 VM + run extra script on Mac host.) - Unless everything can be orchestrated from the Mac host, but I guess that’s unlikely to materialize.

The solution is cross building. Soon I have Linux ARM64 hardware (non-Mac). Then I can create Linux ARM64 builds on Linux ARM64.

But the problem will still be VirtualBox VM files and ova creation. Because while there is VirtualBox Mac ARM64, there is no VirtualBox Linux ARM64 at time of writing.

One solution might be to use AMD64 Linux version on ARM64 and qemu-amd64-static vboxmanage ..., if that is even possible. (Might be possible since vboxmanage is rather “simple”, it’s not the virtualizer.)

A different solution might be to create the VirtualBox settings files and ova using alternative tooling. But that could be error-prone.

Links to Debain specific issue trackers and existing tickets can be found in the linked forum thread.

With the current maintenance situation - at time of writing - with multiple months outdated versions and existing tickets being ignored - of VirtualBox in Debian that seems futile. The only thing that would help is contributing to Debian directly by becoming a Debian Developer.