PSA: M4 Mac cannot run virtual machines on older versions of MacOS

Apple recently unveiled the new MacBook Pro, IMAC and MAC Mini with an M4 chip. This brings a lot of performance improvements, especially when it comes to AI tasks. However, users are facing problems when trying to run virtual machines using some older versions of MacOS on new machines.

M4 Mac and Virtual Machine

As researcher Csaba Fitzl pointed out (via Eccentric light company), the latest Mac with M4 chips doesn’t seem to be able to run virtual machines on MacOS versions before Ventura 13.4. This issue affects the virtualization software available to your Mac.

According to the website, when I try to run a virtual machine on an M4 Mac with MACS prior to MACOS 13.3, I get a black screen where the VM cannot boot. Many users have tried to change the Virtualizer settings or launch the VM in Recovery mode, but the results are the same. On a Mac with an M1, M2 or M3 chip, everything works fine.

The bad news is that no one has any concrete clues about what exactly causes bugs and incompatibility.

Unfortunately, this bug prevents the VM from starting, so there is no reliable way to access the logs and discover what’s going on there. There are no indications of failure in the host logs. The host appears to initialize normal and other support without errors or failures. After that, the host virtualization process is silent when it waits for the VM to start, but that never happens.

Researchers say the bug is likely to affect the early parts of the kernel boot. This will require Apple to release the old version of the new IPSW file to work with the M4 Mac. However, this is very unlikely.

Anyone using a VMS running a MacOS version before 13.4 should be careful before upgrading to a new M4 Mac. Apple has not yet admitted this issue. For other Apple silicon Macs, you can run VMs on MacOS 12 Monterey or later (the minimum recommended version for these Macs is 12.4).

In a related note, MacOS Sequoia has added multiple extensions to the virtual machine. This included full support for logging to iCloud accounts, which is previously impossible on Mac VMs.

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