The aim is to get Kali Linux running on an Apple M1 Macbook Air with QEMU with a reasonable level of performance. The performance part is a work in progress. I'm currently tweaking the QEMU startup command, experimenting with different parameters.
QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer (https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/about/index.html). Since VirtualBox doesn't suport Apple M1, QEMU is increasingly becoming a go-to option for running other operating system UIs.
Let's install QEMU using Homebrew.
brew install qemu
- Go to https://www.kali.org/get-kali/#kali-bare-metal
- Pick the installer that matches your need from the 64-bit section.
Why x86 64-bit and not the Apple M1 installer?! Because I was not able to get the Kali Linux Applie M1 installer running using QEMU. That's why! :)
mkdir qemu-m1-kalilinucd qemu-m1-kalilinuqemu-img create -f qcow2 kali.qcow2 30G- Copy the Kali Linux 64-bit installation image to the same dorectory
qemu-system-x86_64 -hda kali.qcow2 -boot d -cdrom kali-linux-2022.3-installer-amd64.iso -m 2G -usb -machine pc
This will launch a QEMU window to kickoff your Kali Linux installation. Step through the installation wizard. Depending on the installation contents you can expect this to take hours to complete.
Once the installation completes the system will reboot. Since you still have the installation cd-rom image mounted, you will come back to the start of the installation wizard after rebooting. Please quit QEMU at this point.
qemu-system-x86_64 -hda kali.qcow2 -boot d -m 2G -usb -machine q35 -cpu max -smp cores=8,threads=1,sockets=1 &
Congratualtions! You are running Kali Linux on your Apple M1 Mac.
This is the command I'm tweaking at the moment to improve the performance of this installation. I'm happy with the memory utilisation. The CPU performance must be improved for this to be useful as a production machine.