UTM lets you run Windows® 10, Windows® 11, Ubuntu®, or macOS(*) fully virtualized with maximum performance. Run Windows® 7, Windows® XP, and other older operating system emulated with decent performance.
UTM uses the popular QEMU system emulator securely in a sandboxed environment to protect your data from viruses and malware in the emulated operating system.
Designed for macOS using the latest and greatest Apple technologies, UTM is built from the ground up with the Mac in mind.
Features:
• Run ARM64 operating systems such as Windows® for ARM and Ubuntu® ARM on your Apple Silicon Mac fully virtualized at near native speeds
• Run Intel/AMD operating system such as Windows® 7, Windows® XP, Ubuntu® Linux, and more (emulated with limited performance on Apple Silicon Macs, fully virtualized on Intel Macs)
• Run macOS 12 or higher in a virtualized environment(*)
• Run Intel applications on Linux with Rosetta(**)
• Over 30 processors can be emulated by the QEMU backend including i386, x64, ARM32, ARM64, MIPS, PPC, and RISC-V for developers and enthusiasts
• Supports macOS Sandbox to protect your data from any viruses or malware infecting the emulated operating system (such as Windows®)
• GUI display mode, terminal console mode, and headless mode (with support for multiple displays)
• Attach USB devices to your virtual machine
• Experimental: GPU accelerated OpenGL on Linux VMs
• Bridged and shared networking support
• Run and store VMs from external drives
• Don't know how to use QEMU? Confused at all the options QEMU provides? UTM provides an easy to understand UI for creating and configuring VMs that does not require knowledge of QEMU command line arguments
Current Limitations:
We are working hard to provide new features. Below are some things currently missing from UTM. We hope to support at least some of these features in the future.
• No direct mounting of external disks and drives, only mounting disk images is supported
• No drag & drop of files and data, only copy paste of text and sharing of a single directory is supported with tools installed
• No GPU acceleration for Windows® and only experimental OpenGL acceleration for Linux (most Windows® games will NOT run)
• macOS virtualization only runs on Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 12 and up. macOS 12 does not support USB sharing, copy/paste, or dynamic resolution.
(*) macOS virtualization is only supported on Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 12 and up.
(**) Linux with Rosetta is only supported on Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 13 and up.
Changes:
* QEMU v9.1.2 The backend has been updated to the latest upstream QEMU which brings with it a variety of bug fixes and performance improvements.
* (macOS 15) Nested virtualization for Linux Linux VMs using Apple Virtualization backend on macOS 15 and M3 or newer will now have nested virtualization enabled by default.
* (macOS 15) Total Store Ordering for QEMU VMs using QEMU backend on macOS 15 can now enable TSO (in QEMU settings) at the hypervisor level. When TSO is enabled on a guest operating system that is aware of the system register (i.e. Rosetta for Linux), performance of Intel emulation within the guest can be greatly improved. Note that if the guest kernel supports dynamically toggling TSO, you do not need to enable this.
* (macOS 15) Improved macOS guest support The last window size (including full screen size) will be restored when the guest supports dynamic resolution. Removable drives and shared directories can now be ejected and changed while the macOS VM is running. Copy/paste synchronization between macOS 15 guest and host now works when the guest tools are installed (from the CD icon in the toolbar).
* v4.6.3 fixed an issue in the last update that caused VMs to not boot
Other notes:
* There is a known issue with macOS 15.0 and 15.0.1 where accesses to files will fail due to permission error. This issue has been resolved with macOS 15.1.
* There is a known issue on M4 series of Macs where virtualization fails for macOS guests older than 13.4. The issue should be addressed by Apple in a future update. (#6794)
* There is a known issue (#6332) with Windows 11 24H2 that causes the display to show a black screen or "Guest has not initialized the display (yet)" upon boot. We recommend not upgrading to 24H2 for existing installs and 23H2 for new installs. If you have already upgraded, please follow the workaround described in the linked issue.
* The default CPU for x86_64 emulation and virtualization will now try to match the architecture of your system or the highest architecture that QEMU supports. For example, a 2016 MacBook Pro or newer will now emulate a "Skylake" based processor instead of a generic x86_64 processor. This should improve compatibility and performance of newer operating systems but may cause issues with older operating systems. If you run into issues, you can manually change the CPU model to an older one in the VM's System settings.
