Did you ever manage to start an interactive getty on the console?

[deitch]

Did you succeed? What device did you use? It looks, based on your description, that it should be /dev/hvc0, but that doesn't seem to do anything.

[cfergeau]

I can interact with the VM terminal after starting it with example/virtualization if this is what you are asking?

[deitch]

Hmm. Then I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong.

I'm running it not with a standard distro, but with a composed minimal one. It's got a small script to read cmdline and determine where to start getty. Yet despite starting several - including to /dev/hvc0 - nothing is interacting.

Do you know what device the actual console is using?

[deitch]

Actually, I tried your approach. I just built from example/ dir, pulled down the Ubuntu 20.04.3 iso, extracted the vmlinuz and initrd, set them to env vars, and tried to boot it. It just sits there.

[cfergeau]

You must gunzip the kernel or it will just sit there indeed. (forgot if this step is m1 specific, or is also needed on x86_64)

[deitch]

It is an arm64 issue. For some reason, arm64 kernels are gzipped (which qemu and others can handle, but macOS VF cannot 🤷‍♂️ ) while x86_64 use built-in compression.

It isn't that, I definitely was using an extracted kernel.