Building and installing for UTM virtual machine on Apple Silicon Mac

Known issues

Please refer to here.

Introduction

Similar to libvirt QEMU virtual machine, this also offers a LineageOS experience inside a QEMU-based virtual machine.

The UTM app is a popular non-commercial virtual machine app made for Apple iOS and macOS, built on QEMU.

Note that we currently only document this for the use on Apple Silicon Macs.

The virtio_* targets are also suitable for use in a UTM virtual machine.

What you’ll need

Let’s begin!

Build LineageOS

Install the platform-tools

If you haven’t previously installed adb and fastboot, you can download them from Google. Extract it running:

unzip platform-tools-latest-linux.zip -d ~

Now you have to add adb and fastboot to your PATH. Open ~/.profile and add the following:

# add Android SDK platform tools to path
if [ -d "$HOME/platform-tools" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/platform-tools:$PATH"
fi

Then, run source ~/.profile to update your environment.

Install the build packages

Several packages are needed to build LineageOS. You can install these using your distribution’s package manager.

To build LineageOS, you’ll need:

Since LineageOS 22.0 the virtio_* targets use a Mesa that is based on upstream repository. To build LineageOS 22.0 and above for the virtio_* targets, you’ll also need:

For Ubuntu 23.10 (mantic) or newer, install libncurses5 from 23.04 (lunar) as follows:

wget https://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/n/ncurses/libtinfo5_6.3-2_amd64.deb && sudo dpkg -i libtinfo5_6.3-2_amd64.deb && rm -f libtinfo5_6.3-2_amd64.deb
wget https://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/n/ncurses/libncurses5_6.3-2_amd64.deb && sudo dpkg -i libncurses5_6.3-2_amd64.deb && rm -f libncurses5_6.3-2_amd64.deb

While for Ubuntu versions older than 23.10 (mantic), simply install:

Additionally, for Ubuntu versions older than 20.04 (focal), install also:

While for Ubuntu versions older than 16.04 (xenial), install:

Java

Different versions of LineageOS require different JDK (Java Development Kit) versions.

* Ubuntu 16.04 and newer do not have OpenJDK 1.7 in the standard package repositories. See the Ask Ubuntu question “How do I install openjdk 7 on Ubuntu 16.04 or higher?”. Note that the suggestion to use PPA openjdk-r is outdated (the PPA has never updated their offering of openjdk-7-jdk, so it lacks security fixes); skip that answer even if it is the most upvoted.

Python

Different versions of LineageOS require different default Python versions.

If your default is python3, but you’re building branch that requires python2, there are various methods to using it, e.g. symlinking it manually or creating a virtualenv for it. We recommend the latter:

Generate the virtualenv once using virtualenv --python=python2 ~/.lineage_venv. Afterwards, activate it in each terminal where you need python2 as default by running ~/.lineage_venv/bin/activate.

The path ~/.lineage_venv can be chosen freely, this is just an example!

Create the directories

You’ll need to set up some directories in your build environment.

To create them:

mkdir -p ~/bin
mkdir -p ~/android/lineage

The ~/bin directory will contain the git-repo tool (commonly named “repo”) and the ~/android/lineage directory will contain the source code of LineageOS.

Install the repo command

Enter the following to download the repo binary and make it executable (runnable):

curl https://storage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo > ~/bin/repo
chmod a+x ~/bin/repo

Put the ~/bin directory in your path of execution

In recent versions of Ubuntu, ~/bin should already be in your PATH. You can check this by opening ~/.profile with a text editor and verifying the following code exists (add it if it is missing):

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi

Then, run source ~/.profile to update your environment.

Configure git

Given that repo requires you to identify yourself to sync Android, run the following commands to configure your git identity:

git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
git config --global user.name "Your Name"

Due to their size, some repos are configured for lfs or Large File Storage. To make sure your distribution is prepared for this, run:

git lfs install

To avoid duplicated Change-Id: trailers in commit messages, especially when cherry-picking changes, make Change-Id: a known trailer to git:

git config --global trailer.changeid.key "Change-Id"

Turn on caching to speed up build

Make use of ccache if you want to speed up subsequent builds by running:

export USE_CCACHE=1
export CCACHE_EXEC=/usr/bin/ccache

and adding that line to your ~/.bashrc file. Then, specify the maximum amount of disk space you want ccache to use by typing this:

ccache -M 50G

where 50G corresponds to 50GB of cache. This needs to be run once. Anywhere from 25GB-100GB will result in very noticeably increased build speeds (for instance, a typical 1hr build time can be reduced to 20min). If you’re only building for one device, 25GB-50GB is fine. If you plan to build for several devices that do not share the same kernel source, aim for 75GB-100GB. This space will be permanently occupied on your drive, so take this into consideration.

You can also enable the optional ccache compression. While this may involve a slight performance slowdown, it increases the number of files that fit in the cache. To enable it, run:

ccache -o compression=true

Initialize the LineageOS source repository

The following branches are currently supported for building a UTM virtual machine package:

Enter the following to initialize the repository:

cd ~/android/lineage
repo init -u https://github.com/LineageOS/android.git -b lineage-23.0 --git-lfs --no-clone-bundle

Download the source code

To start the download of the source code to your computer, type the following:

repo sync

The LineageOS manifests include a sensible default configuration for repo, which we strongly suggest you use (i.e. don’t add any options to sync). For reference, our default values are -j 4 and -c. The -j 4 part implies be four simultaneous threads/connections. If you experience problems syncing, you can lower this to -j 3 or -j 2. On the other hand, -c makes repo to pull in only the current branch instead of all branches that are available on GitHub.

Select the target to build

Please refer to this to help select your target.

Start the build

Time to start building!

To build the ZIP archive containing UTM virtual machine package with LineageOS pre-installed:

m vm-utm-zip

If the build completed without errors, the ZIP archive will appear at out/target/product/<target>/VirtualMachine/UTM/UTM-VM-lineage-*-20251025-UNOFFICIAL-<target>.zip.

Now, transfer the ZIP archive to the Apple Silicon Mac which you wish to run it on.

Install UTM app

Please refer to the UTM Documentation.

Install the virtual machine

Locate the ZIP archive UTM-VM-lineage-*-20251025-UNOFFICIAL-<target>.zip in Finder.

Double-click on it to decompress it.

After the decompression process finishes, the UTM virtual machine package named LineageOS_on_<Architecture>.utm will appear in the same directory.

Double-click on the package, the UTM main window will appear, and the virtual machine will be loaded on UTM with the name LineageOS on <Architecture>.

Set the renderer backend

If the renderer backend ANGLE (Metal) is used, the Android UI will not appear after Android finishes booting. It is necessary to ensure the renderer backend is always set to ANGLE (OpenGL) when using this virtual machine.

Click on an empty area of the UTM main window, click UTM on the menu bar, and then click Settings.

On the new window, switch to Display tab, select ANGLE (OpenGL) on the Renderer Backend dropdown menu, then close the window.

Disable virtualization mode if necessary

If the target is ARM (64-bit only) architecture, proceed to the next step.

If not, please open virtual machine settings, switch to QEMU tab, untoggle Use Hypervisor, then close the window.

Start the virtual machine

That’s it! The virtual machine is ready to use.

Now, you can start the virtual machine.