Running Ika inside an ARM64 Linux VM on UTM with nested KVM

[000lester]

I have an M3 Pro MacBook with 18 GB of unified memory and would like to run Ika inside an ARM64 Linux VM using UTM. I am not asking about running Ika natively on macOS.

UTM 4.6+ supports nested virtualization for ARM64 Linux guests on M3 and newer Macs when using the Apple Virtualization backend on macOS 15+. In principle, this should expose /dev/kvm inside the Linux VM.

The proposed setup would be:

macOS on M3 Pro
└── UTM with Apple Virtualization
    └── ARM64 Fedora or Debian/Ubuntu
        └── Ika/Cuttlefish using nested KVM

Has anyone tested Ika in this configuration?

I am particularly interested in whether the following components are expected to work through UTM:

• Nested KVM for the inner Cuttlefish VM
• Cuttlefish networking and vsock
• /dev/dri/render* access
• gfxstream, Vulkan and udmabuf
• Dynamic display resizing
• guest_swiftshader as a fallback if accelerated graphics cannot work

Would the existing ARM64 RPM or Debian packages be expected to run once /dev/kvm is available, or does Ika rely on direct physical-GPU capabilities that UTM’s virtual GPU cannot provide?

If accelerated gfxstream is unlikely to work, would a headless or guest_swiftshader configuration still be a reasonable way to run a custom Cuttlefish/AOSP build?

I would be happy to test this setup and provide logs or document the process if there are particular checks or configuration changes you recommend.

[DesktopECHO]

In theory this could work, but I'm not aware of anyone who has tried it. Give a shot and report back!