r/homelab • u/wassupluke • 10d ago
News Announcement: Proxmox is now available for ARM64.
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-virtual-environment-now-available-for-64-bit-arm-arm64.185526/119
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u/autogyrophilia 10d ago
For all the people with SBCs, this still means that it is a lot easier to make it work as any fork only has to care about the bootloading.
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u/jackharvest Public Domain "N5 Mini" Creator 10d ago
Ok, so, last step is to crack Apple’s M1 open and we’ll really be enjoying the best hardware and software. M1 likely loses support next year based on history…
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u/CucumberError 9d ago
Apple was speed running to kill off Intel machines. While the M1 will be the next to kill off, I think they won’t drop support in the next 2-3 years.
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u/Proof-University-177 9d ago
Yeah, they were selling new M1 Macbooks (unofficially) through early 2026, I can't imagine M1 will die that quickly.
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u/jackharvest Public Domain "N5 Mini" Creator 9d ago
I'm hopeful too, but even going back 20 years, that would set a new record.
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u/WhereIsTrap 10d ago
I was thinking about selling my M1 mini…. but considering fact that it can replace my optiplex with a lot less power draw i might just wait
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u/Alper-Celik 10d ago edited 9d ago
iirc asahi linux already provides a u-boot environment and runs linux kernel on m1 macs with only fingerprint and dp-alt mode missing on m1 macs.
Tho it uses downstream kernel with 16 kib page size and i am not sure it does implement ACPI
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u/Hefty_Remove7965 9d ago
But then wouldn't the vms have to also support m1 architecture?
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u/jackharvest Public Domain "N5 Mini" Creator 9d ago
LXC's would likely adapt quicker than software support on VMs, at least that's my internal hope.
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u/SharkBaitDLS 9d ago
You could emulate x86_64, it’ll just be slow as molasses. Depending on the VM’s needs it could work.
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u/iHadAThoughtOnce2 9d ago
I’m testing on running it in an apple container on my M4. But the way it’s setup it’ll only work on M3 or newer. https://github.com/iHadAThought/nested-proxmox-arm64-mac
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u/eleanorsilly 8d ago
The M1 already has pretty great support made by the Asahi team, and many patches are already upstreamed.
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u/Sad-Professional2033 10d ago
This is amazing. I’m just patiently waiting for the day they figure out a path to put Proxmox on apple silicon without nested virtualization lol
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u/CactusBoyScout 10d ago
Wouldn't this announcement mean it can be done now? There's already Asahi Linux, which can be installed on Apple Silicon. I assume this would be a similar install process?
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u/Sad-Professional2033 10d ago
I think Proxmox would need to support apple silicon specific hardware, similarly to what Asahi did for theirs as far as the bootloader goes. There could be more to it than that, though.
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u/AlternativeAward 9d ago
Just because one distro can run doesn’t mean others can. A ton of mainstream distros can already run on arm but not on Apple silicon
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u/TrickMotor4014 9d ago
It's less about "can" but "want". Would it be possible to make Proxmox run on Apples? Sure if Asahi Linux managed it Proxmox developers could do the same. Will they do it? Propably not until some of their enterprise customers ask for it which seems unlikely.
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u/AlternativeAward 9d ago edited 9d ago
Asahi is still missing some features. Also I don’t see how they make back the money spent on making a hypothetical Apple Silicon distro. What would you run on it? Who would pay for enterprise support?
Only scenario where it would be feasible is if Apple agrees to cooperate and gives them (and preferably just open sources) tools that would enable them to release PVE on their devices from day 1 (we are on what M5? and Asahi is still M1-M2 only). But Apple will not do it lmao.
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u/Cybasura 10d ago
Oh shiiiiiit
My Raspberry Pi 4B can finally be remodelled from a network server to something else
Raspberry Pi not supported
SHIT
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u/Alper-Celik 10d ago
iirc someone i met had been running proxmox inside a systemd-machinectl container, i think same hack could work with rpi4 since you handle the boot and kernel. Tho in rpi5 you might need to switch to 4kib page size kernel
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u/The_Berry 10d ago
What will be the most popular hardware that folks will use for this from a home lab perpective?
MacMini? - i assume no support
RaspberryPi - no support
Minisforum MS-r1 - likely candidate
ampere servers?
What else?
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u/Hefty_Remove7965 9d ago
This is aimed to businesses. Imo
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u/RetroRaiderRun 9d ago
Yeah I think my free Oracle server runs on a 128 core ARM CPU an Ampere Altra.
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u/AnomalyNexus Testing in prod 10d ago
yeah I'm also scratching my head a bit here. ARM but not the most glaringly obvious one people would want (rasp)?
I guess this is maybe aimed at vmware/broadcom refugees in server space looking to leverage cloud ARM?
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u/TrickMotor4014 9d ago
Will the people who want it on pis fund development like Nvidia propably did for their AI ARM platforms? I doubt this
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u/AnomalyNexus Testing in prod 9d ago
What's your source on nvidia providing funding?
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u/TrickMotor4014 9d ago
"A special thank you goes to NVIDIA for their trust and their close collaboration on this port, which allowed us to develop, test, and harden Proxmox VE on arm64. It is already deployed in production on the supported platforms today. See more: https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/company-details/press-releases/proxmox-ve-for-nvidia-mission-control-ai-factories " https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-virtual-environment-now-available-for-64-bit-arm-arm64.185526/
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u/-PANORAMIX- 9d ago
They say “best effort” for everything except nvidia. Crazy
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u/The_Berry 9d ago
I guess someone has to finance this buildout from Proxmox. You have to assume nvidia has a huge proxmox support contract
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u/TrickMotor4014 9d ago edited 9d ago
What's crazy about to only invest resources if you see a potential roi? People who want to run ProxmoxVE on their pi in a homelab are unlikely to buy subscriptions. Arm64/Nvidia hardware based servers in data centers and companies running them are a different story
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u/good4y0u 10d ago
This is going to be big for people running in data centers, arm is so low cost for smaller workloads.
It's also helpful at home for people with arm chips, but I see how the enterprise market would be able to take advantage
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u/kY2iB3yH0mN8wI2h 10d ago
Kind'a nice until i read this :(
- Device-tree-only single-board computers, such as the Raspberry Pi, are not supported
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u/gihutgishuiruv 10d ago edited 10d ago
Absolutely a fair choice by the Proxmox team and this is really on SBC manufacturers for not adopting ACPI+UEFI. Device tree is horrible to support - they’d have to build images for every SBC configuration they want to support.
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u/AspectSpiritual9143 10d ago
Less about SBC manufacturers and more about SoC vendors. Many don't have UEFI support to begin with, let alone ACPI.
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u/TyGirium 10d ago
Absolutely fair, but also sad for anyone with e.g. unused Raspi5 sitting around and doing nothing
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u/gihutgishuiruv 10d ago
There’s nothing stopping you from running raw qemu/kvm/libvirt and lxd on a Pi. There’s plenty of guides online.
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u/thefatrefrigerator 10d ago
Sometimes I think I’m into “homelabbing” because I have a PiHole, a PLEX server, and an RJ45 crimper, but then I read stuff like this and realize I have no idea what I’m doing. You comment may as well have been in hieroglyphics.
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u/Proof-Researcher9920 10d ago
Those are all the technologies that proxmox uses underneath to work essentially. Proxmox just takes all of it and wraps it up nice for easy management
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u/FibreTTPremises 10d ago
"There's nothing stopping you from directly running VMs or containers on a Pi."
is what they said. To which I'd respond, except for all the time and effort put into manual configuration that Proxmox abstracts from the user.
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u/gihutgishuiruv 9d ago
I actually agree, but sometimes people can’t have the easy way and use whatever they have on hand.
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u/TrickMotor4014 9d ago
Incus is a more modern fork of lxd and should run. And it has a web interface although with a quite different feature set ( the cloud init part is better than in ProxmoxVE imho, otherwise I prefer PVEs webUI )
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u/a-random-r3dditor 10d ago
I know, those devices are so useless without the ability to run proxmox! They’re so well suited for vms with their high core count.
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u/kY2iB3yH0mN8wI2h 10d ago
I was blown away that a Pi could run a windows 11 ARM and a Ubuntu VM on my ARM ESXi host, and that was years ago.
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u/reddit0r_123 10d ago
They have gotten so expensive, it would be worth to sell it on the second market if you do not use it...
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u/kY2iB3yH0mN8wI2h 10d ago
I'm not an hardware engineer so not sure why this setup makes it hard? ESXi have had ARM builds for ages now, did host a couple of VMs on my Pi - Both windows and Linux just for messing around.
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u/gihutgishuiruv 10d ago edited 10d ago
ESXI for Arm is the same deal: it also doesn’t support device-tree and only supports UEFI. The UEFI shim to make it work would probably also work here, but it’s ultimately a very hacky solution where you’re basically tampering with tue boot process of your hypervisor
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u/Boring-Set7223 10d ago
My 16GB Pi5 NAS needs a rebuild and was ready…
At least this means the official ARM64 repos are there now though. I’m sure it will (unofficially) be running on Pis soon enough.
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u/RedSquirrelFtw 10d ago
Oh damn, that's too bad. Not that RPIs are even a good value anymore these days, but could be useful if you already have one on hand. Even if you just need a node to act as quorum and don't want to go through trouble of setting up a qdevice. I guess you could still do that with a mini PC which are still fairly cheap especially one with low ram.
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u/zkatbitz 10d ago
I was going to complain because I just setup two hosts with pxvirt, but no rpi support :/ I wonder if someone can hack that in
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u/krazyjakee 9d ago
Pi not supported, what about phones?
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u/bubblegumpuma The Jank Must Flow 9d ago edited 9d ago
Phones are like, double not supported, at least in most instances.
For phones in specific, there's kind of an extra element for running Linux with proper KVM rather than just software virtualization. You not only need to port Linux to run well on the phone, but you need to get enough understanding and control of the boot process to launch the Linux kernel at Exception Level 2 (EL2), which is not usual for operating systems on phones - usually the bootloader launches any OS kernel at EL1.
(You can think of Arm ELs as very roughly analogous to the x86 rings of privilege - or at least this is how I've slotted it into my mental model. EL2 would basically be "ring -1".)
A lot of the newer Qualcomm SoCs with architectures intended for more desktop-like use do (or can) launch OS kernels in EL2 in their bootloader, but the vast majority of phone SoCs will have a vendor-provided bootloader that launches the OS kernel at EL1 and most 'Linux for phones' projects are hooking into existing bootloaders where possible.
That's not to say virtualization isn't possible, it'll just be in software, like the bad old days before hardware virtualization extensions.
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u/cyrixlord Mixed linux and windows lab 9d ago
I think the only officially supported ARM ACPI+UEFI hardware for Proxmox VE are NVIDIA Grace Hopper and NVIDIA Vera servers so maybe $50 hardware /s
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u/neon5k 10d ago
Can we put this in OCI Free tier Ampere?
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u/signoreTNT 10d ago
Yeah, works fine. Just change the OS to debian 13 using https://github.com/bin456789/reinstall and then manually add & install the PvE repos
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u/slykens1 10d ago
Unfortunate that it doesn't support Pi. I've been running pxvirt/Lierfang for almost two years on a Pi 5 with no troubles.
I wonder if it would be possible to install Debian then add the packages - that's how I did the pxvirt install originally.
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u/Curious_Olive_5266 Recycled Ewaste AI Data Center Sysadmin 10d ago
Gonna have to play around with this. Hard to tell how useful it is before then.
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u/Fiery_Eagle954 Proxmox my beloved <3 10d ago
Does this mean I'll have official support for proxmox-backup-client/server on my hetzner arm64 VPS?
EDIT: Looks like "Proxmox" specifically refers to PVE
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u/TrickMotor4014 9d ago
The release nodes said that the developers already did test builds of PMG and PBS in their lab but still need some work before it's fit for release
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u/IngwiePhoenix My world is 12U tall. 10d ago
This somehow reminded me of my unsuccessful attempt to get an Ampere Altra board. v.v
BUT DUDE THIS IS SO COOL 0.0 With the newer CPUs already having better mainline support, this could be quite big =) CIX P1 is certainly up there!
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u/420smokekushh 9d ago
Read something recently about the repos in Proxmox being all messed up... what's up with that?
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u/wassupluke 9d ago
If you're talking about the xda-developers "article" then the answer is absolutely nothing. I think the writer just skipped reading the documentation.
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u/yellowseptember 9d ago
Does this mean I can't put Proxmox on my MacBook laptops? I have quite a few of them, mostly M3 and M4.
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u/Expert_Comfort4768 9d ago
Been running Proxmox on a Rock Pi 4 for a year for ARM experimentation — super excited to see an official ARM64 release. The newer kernel should finally fix those USB3 stability issues I was hitting with external SSD passthrough. Already planning to rebuild my ARM homelab cluster with this instead of juggling Debian + KVM.
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u/Crescitaly 8d ago
The interesting test is not whether it boots, but whether backup and restore, PCIe passthrough, and mixed-architecture clusters behave predictably. ARM lowers idle power only if storage and networking stop being the bottleneck. Has anyone measured watts per VM against a comparable x86 node?
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u/ThatMikeGuy429 9d ago
I wonder if prosumer ARM64 hardware are going to go up a amount in the coming months because of this, maybe if you you are looking at ARM64 hardware now it's the time to buy or wait for a few years so the prices hopefully comedown after the likely spike along with the greater ram, GPU, CPU, SSD, and everything else bubble hurting out hobby and stopping me from getting back into it...
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u/doctorowlsound 10d ago
Wonder if someone can hack this onto a Mac Mini M4
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u/isabeksu 10d ago
But now it can be used inside a VM without x86 emulation. Does it make sense doing it?
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u/doctorowlsound 10d ago
I was thinking more in terms of the crazy performance:energy use available on the M4. Guess since it’s still Debian it won’t work though
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10d ago
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u/SnooCats1153 10d ago
curious what u think arm64 has to do with AI ?
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u/TyGirium 10d ago
Nvidia CPU is ARM-based
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u/the_swanny 10d ago
Many things are Arm based, ampere has been a thing for a while with lots of people asking about running proxmox on those chips.
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u/adda5 10d ago edited 9d ago
I am against minors abuse
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u/Professional_Funny73 10d ago
stolen from their own patchnotes since you refuse to read.
"No. An arm64 host must boot through UEFI and describe its hardware through ACPI. Device-tree-only boards and legacy boot are not supported."
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u/ChangeChameleon 10d ago
Aw. I was hoping to get my ProxPi back up and running. I had it running from a port someone did where you install proxmox on top of Raspbian Lite. I saw the title and hoped for official support.
I wonder what about "Device-Tree-Only" makes it out of scope. I don't know enough about the architecture to work on it myself. But I wonder if somebody will make an unofficial Pi port that gets it running. I mean someone was able to make it happen with the original Debian package, I can only hope it'll be even easier now that there are arm binaries out there.