Possible Manjaro support for Apple silicon?

ARM General ARM Discussion
24

Hey, I started experimenting with Manjaro ARM images in UTM on M1 MacBook Pro a couple of weeks ago. Initially there were a bunch of obstacles to overcome. After some initial trial-n-error I was able to get the images booting (at least), but faced issues with the calamares oem installer. As it turned out this was due to the initial display configuration in the VM…

Configuring it properly, and also installing the spice-vdagent enabled me today to run through the initial setup and after reboot have a fully functioning desktop (tested with GNOME and Sway at the moment)…

GNOME:

d652ea20fb4ce5bf
d652ea20fb4ce5bf1918×1080 132 KB

Sway:

8204f5501c79bee4
8204f5501c79bee41921×1079 96.6 KB

As usual Sway is a bit more manual tweaking as the wlroots usually require hw-accel graphics, which seems to be buggy in Qemu / UTM. So adding some environment variables to enable fallback to sw-raster is required. Performance is decent though…

Note: this thing is still very experimental. One thing that might break it easily is a Linux kernel update in the VM (due to the way you set up UTM to boot from a given Linux kernel and ramdisk). As such I disabled Linux kernel updates in the VMs for now…

2 Likes
25

hello appel! Would it be in any way possible go into more detail about how you managed to get manjaro arm working on UTM? I am a mac m1 user, with not a lot of linux experience, and would love to get manjaro working on my m1.
I have tried both virtualisation (Manjaro-ARM-gnome-generic-22.06) as well as emulation (Manjaro-ARM-gnome-generic-22.06) on UTM but neither work.
Thank you!! :slight_smile:

1 Like
26

I’m working on a blog post with the details. Will update here as soon as it’s published.

1 Like
27

Here we go… New Tech on the Blog

Please check it out and let me know if something doesn’t work for you. I run through the steps once more today with the KDE profile…

2 Likes
28

If you haven’t seen it already - there’s some good news with relation to this thread

29

The same:
I am testing UTM/QEMU on my M1 MacMini.
I also downloaded Manjaro-ARM-gnome-generic-22.06.img - but that don’t work
But with a also downloaded debian-11.4.0-arm64-DVD-1.iso image the installation with the UTM/QUMU default settings worked without problems.
What makes Debian different?
Manjaro is my prefered Linux distribution.

30

We don’t have UEFI support yet. That’s likely the difference.

31

How I could create an non UEFI VM in UTM/QEMU - deactivate UEFI don’t work.

32

It seems you can download a non-supported UEFI image.

More information in this thread.

You will need startup.nsh (see in thread).
I couldn’t load the desktop, as there is no AMD driver, but the terminal was working.

33

No. That’s a supported non-UEFI image.

34

I have been able to install GNOME and KDE versions from the provided generic images as described on my blog post. Even though it’s not as straightforward as using an ISO image it’s still doable and working quite well…

35

Great, I marked the post with the link as the solution, so it’s easy to find.

2 Likes
36

This topic was automatically closed 2 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.