Whonix on Mac M1 (ARM) - Development Discussion

Patrick · December 7, 2025, 9:46am

I have succeeded cross-building a Whonix VirtualBox ova image.

The build process succeeded without errors.
I haven’t attempted to actually import and boot the ova image on VirtualBox on a Mac M#. Booting it might actually fail. Needs testing.

Some hints for building:

Version 18 (and above) only.
Build host: Debian 13 / trixie or Kicksecure 18 on architecture Intel/AMD64.
- Building on ARM64 isn’t be possible at the time of writing.
  - At the time of writing, VirtualBox provides Linux (Debian) packages for AMD64 only. ARM64 VirtualBox Linux packages aren’t available at the time of writing.
    - Whonix on Mac M1 (ARM) - User Support (still unsupported at time of writing) - #438 by Patrick
- Building Whonix VirtualBox ARM64 on Debian / Kicksecure ARM64 will potentially become possible if running vboxmanage inside a chroot as discussed above.
Set target architecture to ARM64 usingderivative-maker command line option:
- ```
--arch arm64
```
Build as per Whonix VM Build Documentation
- Build documentation has been updated just now.
- Comes with examples for ARM64 VirtualBox.