Big Sur Parallels Desktop
Apple has at last released macOS Big Sur! First previewed at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2020, and then finally released to the world in November 2020, macOS Big Sur has had the longest beta development cycle of any macOS release in recent history.
The silver lining: engineers at Parallels® used this time to work in lockstep with their Apple counterparts in an effort to ensure that users will have the best possible Parallels Desktop® experience once migrated to macOS Big Sur.
The greatest amount of Parallels engineering work came in response to a significant change in the underpinnings of macOS Big Sur. As a Mac user, you may have seen dialogs (like the one shown in Figure 1) when using macOS Catalina or macOS Mojave.
The change in the macOS necessitated the re-architecture of Parallels Desktop (seen in Figure 2).
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While this figure illustrates what may appear to be a small change, it required the largest amount of engineering work in Parallels Desktop 16 and the equivalent of 25 man-years of engineering effort. This change means that even more of the performance and security of Parallels Desktop will be derived from Apple’s updates to the internal architecture of macOS going forward.
In addition to the work diagrammed in Figure 2, the Parallels engineers have added a number of new features to Parallels Desktop 16, and to bundled products Parallels Toolbox and Parallels Access, including:
- macOS Big Sur support
- 3D support in macOS VMs
- In macOS Big Sur, Parallels Desktop offers an easier onboarding experience by using the native macOS system extensions instead of the deprecated kernel ones. Support for macOS 11.0 Parallels Desktop 16 supports macOS Big Sur 11.0, macOS Catalina 10.15, macOS.
- Parallels Desktop 16 adds Big Sur support, 3D Metal support, and more Windows on Apple silicon is still a question mark, though. Samuel Axon - 8/11/2020, 12:01 AM Parallels Desktop 16's Control.
I learned from Parallels forum that the problem was caused by version check of Parallels. The solution is first set the environment variable 'SYSTEMVERSIONCOMPAT=1', and then use command 'open -a 'Parallels Desktop' ' in terminal to run PD. Now PD15 can start. Select Install macOS Big Sur.app and click Continue. Click Continue to accept creating a new file on Mac disk, then click Save. Wait a few minutes while Parallels Desktop is creating a disk image file. Specify the desired name and location and click Create. Parallels Desktop 16 will create a virtual machine and boot to the macOS Big Sur installer.
Learn more about these features in Video 1.
Parallels Desktop is ready for you when you decide to migrate to macOS Big Sur. Let us know in the comments when you will be upgrading, and then, how the migration went!
(C) 2020 Parallels International GmbH
Guest blog post from Dmitry Geynisman, Product Manager at Parallels
You may have seen these messages from both macOS and Parallels Desktop for Mac:
No worries, in this blog post I will explain the situation in detail. First, I will give you a relatively short answer about why Parallels® Desktop uses system extensions, and then more details will follow.
- Parallels Desktop uses a hypervisor technology to create a high-performance virtual machine, so you can run Windows, Linux, macOS, and other operating systems inside it.
- There are 2 types of hypervisors on macOS that Parallels can use: Apple’s built-in hypervisor or Parallels’ proprietary hypervisor. Parallels proprietary hypervisor is implemented as a system extension.
- System extensions in macOS enable developers to integrate deep into the macOS system to achieve better performance or provide some unique functionality.
- When Parallels Desktop attempts to load the Parallels hypervisor system extensions, macOS prompts a user to ‘allow’ this. System extensions have elevated privileges and if they are coming from a non-trusted source, can be used maliciously. So, it is a security precaution, similar to how your phone apps ask to access your camera.
If you downloaded Parallels Desktop from parallels.com and the system extension is signed by “Parallels International GmbH”, then you are in good hands.
- Parallels recommends you use Apple’s built-in hypervisor. That way macOS won’t bother you with System Extension approval or the need to reboot. However, if you need to use the Nested Virtualization feature or a specific workload where Parallels hypervisor shows higher performance scores, you may keep using Parallels hypervisor.
- To change a hypervisor type, first, you need to shut down or stop your virtual machine. Note that for this you might need to start or resume the virtual machine and approve Parallels hypervisor system extension.
When your VM is stopped, go to VM configuration > Hardware > CPU & Memory > Advanced Settings > click on the “Hypervisor” dropdown > select “Apple” or “Parallels” respectively.
If you have multiple virtual machines, you may need to change the setting for every one of them.
Now, if you’re not bored yet, I’d love to tell you more about this story.
For more than a decade, Parallels developed its proprietary drivers (aka system extensions) for running Windows and other OSes on top of the macOS. These drivers made Parallels Desktop the best virtualization solution, the fastest, and the most technologically advanced.
Parallels Beta
At the same time, for several years, Apple has been moving towards making macOS the most secure and reliable desktop OS (and I should say, Apple succeeded in many ways). One of the key aspects is not to let developers intrude on the OS kernel by loading those extensions (aka “kexts”), as those who have access to the kernel can do things at the very heart of your Mac, which may prove quite dangerous. In order to do that, Apple must replace 3rd-party kernel extensions with the native system APIs that ultimately enable the same product features, and that is massive engineering work even for such a big enterprise as Apple.
Since 2017, with the macOS High Sierra 10.13 release, Apple started to block 3rd-party kexts automatically, and users have had to enable them manually since. At that time, we published this blog post that can tell you even more about Parallels Desktop using system extensions.
In March 2020, with the release of macOS Catalina 10.15.4, Apple started to warn users that some of their apps (that use deprecated system extension) would “be incompatible with a future version of macOS” (read: with macOS Big Sur).
At WWDC20, Apple was quoted as saying that “System Extensions improve the reliability and security of macOS, and deprecated kernel extensions will not load by default in macOS Big Sur”. Eventually, to make Parallels Desktop fully compatible with the new macOS Big Sur 11.0, Parallels Engineering has gone through years of engineering work of rebuilding Parallels Desktop and its features using the new macOS system APIs. This extensive and time-intensive development resulted in the all-new Parallels Desktop, explicitly designed to work and integrate with new macOS Big Sur technologies, and at the same time, deliver performance and productivity improvements to benefit Parallels Desktop customers.
This scheme below visually describes the difference between the default Parallels Desktop modes on the corresponding macOS version. The old Parallels Desktop design using Parallels system extensions is shown on the left, and the newly-invented Parallels Desktop 16, using macOS Big Sur APIs, is shown on the right.
Parallels 16 Beta
For now, our team continues to work on supporting both Parallels and Apple hypervisors and continues collaborating with Apple on implementing the rest of Parallels Hypervisor features to Apple Hypervisor. We recommend using Apple hypervisor, and if you notice any difference between Apple and Parallels hypervisors for your use case, please let us know.
Parallels Desktop 16 Big Sur
Download a free trial of Parallels Desktop for Mac and try it out yourself.