Is nested virtualization is supported by Apple Silicon chips (M2/M3)?
Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
Ask questions, find answers and collaborate at work with Stack Overflow for Teams. Explore Teams
I'm trying to find if the latest Apple Silicon chips support fully nested virtualization. Namely the ability for it to run a VM inside another VM.
Its really hard to find definitive answers. Most discussions about this are on fan forums that say that the Apple chips support the ARM instruction set. Which does have a fully fleshed out procedure for infinitely nested virtualization.
It depends a bit on what you mean by "support" exactly. To better understand the nuances in that word, first a quick and rough overview of how ARM CPUs (such as the Apple Silicon M-series) runs software at different privilege levels:
ARM CPUs divide the world into different exceptions levels - namely EL0, EL1, EL2 and EL3. Here EL0 is the least privileged level and EL3 is the most privileged level.
