Hello!

I've completed the development work to paravirtualize Slackware AArch64 on Apple Silicon (M1/M2), using both the open source virtualization tool UTM and the proprietary VMware Fusion.

You can find the installation guides here:

UTM

VMware Fusion


The Slackware installer is provided as a generic, bootable EFI ISO image using the GRUB bootloader. This format should also be compatible with other bare-metal AArch64 hardware models that aren't currently supported (dd'ing the ISO to a USB or SD card for example - I'll try later with the HoneyComb LX2). While I don’t have a personal interest in running Slackware natively on a Mac (and can’t anyway—this one isn’t mine), having a bootable ISO should help accelerate efforts for anyone exploring that path.

I’ve successfully built a kernel and Rust inside an 8-core, 6GB RAM VM running under UTM—and it's fast.


Enjoy!
MoZes@slackware

Congratulations & well done. I've read over this in some detail, as I'm laid up ATM with Achilles tendon issues.

The iso is a great idea. I've considered the Mac for my next pc (If there is one), as they beat anything similar out of the park.

Finally got a MacBook Air M4 today (picked up a 24gb RAM model) and I'm going to do a fresh VM install on here. Now that I can crank up my VM to use 16gb ram safely, I'm going to see how fast this baby zooms

Congratulations, this is awesome.
I wanted to run Slackware on this Apple Silicon laptop since it's been made my main machine at work. Now I can
Thanks for all your work drmozes!

Thanks, everyone. I’ll be updating the image in the next few weeks. One thing I’d like to improve is the initial font size in VMware during the keymap selection—it’s a bit too small on a laptop screen, though it’s more manageable on a monitor.

Wow, very impresive, this tasteful thickness, I am thrilled !!-- How's about reuse this paravirtualization callings to run HV macOS with any picture -- I mean of gathering something kinda backward -- Should will be possible ever HV /wo Parrarels on AArch64 architecture? My respect, gentlemens

As someone who has no Mac, but has thoughts of buying one (which may even come cheap thanks to the Trump vs. Xi trade war), how does the graphics perform on this VM? 4K? 8k?

Been testing with UTM, VMWare, and Parallels over the last few weeks (M4 Max). First, the guides and information shared by drmozes is awesome. I cannot tell you how much time this saved me, and it gave me something to focus on other than work! Thank you drmozes for your time and efforts!!!

UTM and VMWare Fusion installations are fairly uneventful, and the VMs appear to be stable and perform well so far. IMO, the UTM VM seems slightly more responsive but you may need to adjust the font size if it's too small. KDE is smooth in both UTM and VMWare, though I rarely use a desktop environment these days so I didn't really go through the gears

I realize this is outside of the scope for this thread, but in case anyone else decides to try with Parallels, it was a bit frustrating. While the setup/installation completed normally (without errors or obvious red flags), most of the files needed by Grub in /boot and /boot/grub were missing (EFI FS, vfat). Once the installation was completed, rebooting presented a bootloader menu with no entry for the new installation.

I spent far too much time trying to figure out why update-grub and grub-install consistently failed with a handful or errors. I eventually gave up and "resolved" it manually by creating /boot/grub/grub.cfg and running update-grub to add the menu entry for the new Slackware installation. I have very little experience with Grub, having mostly used lilo and elilo in the past.

Once you are able to issue the correct commands and boot the OS from the grub cli prompt, the rest should be familiar. This worked for me:

insmod part_msdos
insmod part_gpt
insmod linux
search --no-floppy --set-root --label SLKroot
linux /boot/Image-armv8 rootfstype=ext4 root=LABEL=SLKroot platwalk
initrd /boot/initrd-armv8
boot

If this boots the OS successfully, then create /boot/grub/grub.cfg and add the info:

nano/pico/vi(other favorite editor) /boot/grub/grub.cfg

###################################################################################
set timeout=10
set default=0
#
menuentry " Slackware " {
echo "Loading Slackware..."
insmod part_msdos
insmod part_gpt
insmod linux
search --no-floppy --set=root --label SLKroot
linux /boot/Image-armv8 rootfstype=ext4 root=LABEL=SLKroot platwalk
initrd /boot/initrd-armv8
}
#
menuentry --hotkey=f "[ UEFI Firmware Settings ]" {
echo "Loading UEFI Firmware Menu..."
fwsetup
}
#
menuentry --hotkey=r "[ Reboot ]" {
echo "Rebooting..."
reboot
}

Save the file and exit. Simply run 'update-grub' without the quotes to update Grub and add the menu entry to the bootloader. Reboot, and hopefully Slackware will be the 1st entry in the list and will boot successfully.

Anyway, long winded, sorry. Hopefully someone finds it helpful.

NOTE - This is not meant to be a "fix", but rather a band aid to allow a bootable system while investigating the root cause.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for the report!

The GRUB install function within the installer only recognises supported hardware models (presently the HoneyComb LX2, IBM Thinkpad X13s, UTM, KVM, QEMU, VMWare; and now Parallels) and will not install GRUB on others, as the necessary settings may be incorrect. After creating the ISO, I realised it can be used on unsupported/unknown EFI-capable hardware models—it just requires a bit more development work to offer the user the installation option, with a suggestion to review the GRUB config before rebooting. I didn’t expect anyone to run into that issue before I had a chance to write the code! ;-)

The next ISO build will automatically set up GRUB when running under the Parallels hypervisor, as it behaves consistently with the other supported hypervisors.

Hello,

A huge thank you for your fantastic work; I was able to easily install Slackware under UTM on an M1 MacBook Air, and it works like a charm!

The only problem I've encountered so far is the lack of sound and videos not working - but even if it stays like this, it's awesome anyway just to be able to run good old Slackware on these impressive new Macs.

Thanks again.

Glad it installs fine! Lack of sound in what environment? It works for me in KDE, once you increase the volume from the default low setting. Video play works fine in Firefox but I didn't check anything else such as playing video files in an application. What doesn't work specifically - playing video in what app?