Apple M1 does not support hardware assisted nested virtualization. If someone was trying to run WSL from Windows, that would be horribly inefficient on M1 vs M3.

Is there actually a way to use nested virtualization on the M2 or M3 yet? As far as I can tell both Parallels and VMWare are still saying they don't have that feature.

No, it needs hardware support for that. It needs another level of virtualized MMU, which Apple didn’t build in. That might come with the M4 generation only.

Here's someone claiming that the required hardware support is already there since M2: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/466761/is-nested-v...

I'm no expert so I cannot tell how reliable that info is.

They also say

> will cause the CPU to pause the guest hypervisor, and let the host hypervisor running at EL2 decide whether and how to proceed. That is a big part in enabling nested virtualisation. There are other details, for example related to memory and interrupt management.

And they don’t elaborate on whether these "further details" were implemented or not; I would guess they’re not implemented, or else Apple would have mentioned it at a WWDC workshop. I might be wrong here though.

I traded an M1 Pro for an M3 Max and my AMD64 Linux containers seem to be MUCH faster, so this would probably carry over to Windows VMs.

That’s pretty much the only reason I bought it. Other than the cool, “space black” color :-) Benchmarks look promising

Are these Arm windows 11 or x86-64?

ARM, occasionally running x86 windows software