Whether is it support nested visualization?

[ByteFlyCoding]

I want create a virtual machine in a existing virtual machine that run on macbook pro of apple sillicon m1 pro. This may need support nested visualization. But I don't know lima-vm whether it is support nested visualization.

[AkihiroSuda]

Nested virtualization seems missing on the M1 series.

Apparently M2 supports nested virt, but Lima can't support it until Virtualization.framework or QEMU supports it.

[msgilligan]

Virtualization Framework beta documentation says it will work on macOS 15+ on M3+:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vzgenericplatformconfiguration/4360553-isnestedvirtualizationsupported?changes=latest_minor

[abiosoft]

I can confirm that I successfully tested nested virtualization support on m3 Macbook running macOS 15 beta and kvm-ok does indeed report success 🎉.

[asauber]

@abiosoft could you share which distro image and lima configuration that you used for testing? With some brief testing, I haven't yet been able to see /dev/kvm on a guest.

[abiosoft]

It's not yet merged in.
You can check #2530 (comment) for context.

[asauber]

I was able to create a Lima VM with KVM support with your testing instructions.

$ limactl shell ubuntunested
WARN[0000] treating lima version "bc39aed.m" from "/Users/asauber/.lima/ubuntunested/lima-version" as very latest release
asauber@lima-ubuntunested:/Users/asauber$ kvm-ok
INFO: /dev/kvm exists
KVM acceleration can be used

Very cool. Thank you for working on this!

[AnthoBalitrand]

Hello guys,
Can you share the details of the config you used to make nested virtualization work ?
(Mainly vmType value and exact image name, along with other non-default parameters you set).

With nestedVirtualization: true, vmType: vz and image 24.10/release-20241212 I do not manage to make it work on MacBook Pro M3 running MacOS 15.2.

[AkihiroSuda]

limactl start --set '.nestedVirtualization=true' template://default

See also:

• https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/pull/3061/files

[AnthoBalitrand]

Still not working :

INFO[0001] Starting the instance "default" with VM driver "vz"
INFO[0001] Attempting to download the image              arch=aarch64 digest="sha256:fb39312ffd2b47b97eaef6ff197912eaa3e0a215eb3eecfbf2a24acd96ee1125" location="https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/24.10/release-20241212/ubuntu-24.10-server-cloudimg-arm64.img"
INFO[0001] Using cache "/Users/xxx/Library/Caches/lima/download/by-url-sha256/e540d15172f1f5be55c9c20dc5bc7ed4338279091f52a8f468a68363673c7547/data"
INFO[0001] Converting "/Users/xxx/.lima/default/basedisk" (qcow2) to a raw disk "/Users/xxx/.lima/default/diffdisk"
3.50 GiB / 3.50 GiB [---------------------------------------] 100.00% 1.55 GiB/s
INFO[0003] Expanding to 100GiB
INFO[0003] Attempting to download the nerdctl archive    arch=aarch64 digest="sha256:af60f6b83074c319cf1d0264b94a2a2f78cb757fe296f8193867d1cf79956e71" location="https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl/releases/download/v2.0.1/nerdctl-full-2.0.1-linux-arm64.tar.gz"
INFO[0003] Using cache "/Users/xxx/Library/Caches/lima/download/by-url-sha256/35c5b08543fe221085711b99a84cac8c496f73d049c8c8795ba0b6b2faac7b5f/data"
INFO[0003] [hostagent] hostagent socket created at /Users/xxx/.lima/default/ha.sock
INFO[0003] [hostagent] Starting VZ (hint: to watch the boot progress, see "/Users/xxx/.lima/default/serial*.log")
FATA[0004] exiting, status={Running:false Degraded:false Exiting:true Errors:[] SSHLocalPort:0} (hint: see "/Users/xxx/.lima/default/ha.stderr.log")

ha.stderr.log contains the following :

{"level":"fatal","msg":"nested virtualization is not supported on this device","time":"2025-01-27T14:09:28+01:00"}

Is there any MacOS command (sysctl ?) to check if nested virtualization has been disabled by any organization profile ?