enckse / vfu

simple virtualization utility for macOS written in swift and using the virtualization framework

vfu

vfu is a swift re-implementation of vftool (in swift!) with a set of changes that make it a bit different to run. The baseline functionality of vftool remains the basis for the current state at this time. The main goal is to take what vftool is and provide the ability to run/configure simple Linux-based VMs via JSON definitions.

Build

to get vfu working:

• clone the repository
• make

Changes

While there is quite a bit of divergence, the major changes are really:

• instead of CLI arguments for all parameters, a JSON configuration file is passed via the --config flag (pass --verify to check the configuration without running the VM)
• bridged networking functionality is removed
• shared directory support (including readonly) via virtio is added
• one (or more) static MACs can be attached
• no tty/pty options, there are serial options (raw, full, none)
• use '~/' to refer to a location starting with the user's home

Configuration

The JSON configuration, to run a minimal alpine iso, is below with the following expectations

1. Download the arm64 (aarch64) standard iso for alpine
2. Extract the vmlinuz-lts and initramfs-lts from the iso (and gzip decompress them)
3. Run the following (assuming vfu has already been built and is PATH and all the specified files are in the current directory)...
4. Create the JSON configuration file (see examples/ as a starting place)
5. Run vfu --config <file>.json

GUI

There is a simple GUI variant of the same vfu code that can be built and used via make bundle (and then make install or manually copying the output release files to /Applications). This functionality allows for attaching an actual virtio graphics setup to a VM configuration