Can the well-known open source virtualisation product run on an Apple Silicon Mac?

The options, and which problem each solves:

Running ARM guests, fast. Several virtualisation products for Apple Silicon run ARM operating systems at near-native speed using the platform's own hypervisor framework. If you need a Linux virtual machine and can use the ARM build — which nearly all major distributions provide — this is the right answer and the performance is excellent.

Running x86 guests, slowly. Emulators exist and will boot an x86 system on ARM hardware. Expect it to be usable for light work and painful for anything demanding. Fine for testing an installer, not for a development environment you live in.

Containers rather than virtual machines. If the actual requirement is Linux userland rather than a full machine, ARM container images cover most of what people used virtual machines for, and they are fast.

A remote x86 machine. A cheap cloud instance or an old desktop in a cupboard, reached over the network. This is what I ended up doing for the few genuinely x86-only things.

It is about both, and the distinction is the key to the whole area.

That product is a virtualiser, not an emulator. Virtualisation means the guest's instructions run directly on the host processor, with the hypervisor managing isolation and hardware access. That is why it is fast, and it requires the guest and host to share an instruction set.

An Apple Silicon Mac has an ARM processor. An x86 guest does not share an instruction set with it, so there is nothing to virtualise — the instructions would have to be translated, which is emulation and a fundamentally different and much slower proposition.

So the requirement means: x86 host, x86 guest. The project's own maintainers have stated they do not intend to port it, for the same reason it does not exist on other ARM platforms.

What you can do instead splits along exactly this line.

One practical check before choosing: work out what you actually need the guest for.

A surprising share of "I need an x86 virtual machine" turns out to be a build target, a database, or a piece of tooling that has a perfectly good ARM build now. The ecosystem has moved a long way, and the list of things that genuinely require x86 is much shorter than it was.

Worth writing that list down before buying or configuring anything, because for many people it comes out empty.

Worth adding a distinction people conflate: the translation layer for applications is not the same as virtualisation.

macOS on Apple Silicon includes a translation layer that runs x86 macOS applications transparently and remarkably well. That leads people to assume an x86 virtual machine should work equally well, and it does not — the translation layer operates on application binaries at the operating system level, not on a guest kernel booting its own operating system.

So "my old x86 apps run fine, why not a virtual machine" has a real answer: those are different mechanisms operating at different layers, and only one of them is available.