I had this issue; updating qemu from 8.1.3_1 to 8.1.3_2 via brew upgrade qemu fixed it.

Updating to qemu 8.1.3_2 resulted in a different exception and hang:

ASSERT [ArmCpuDxe] /home/kraxel/projects/qemu/doms/edk2/ArmPkg/Library/DefaultExceptionHandlerLib/AArch64/DefaultExceptionHandler.c(333): ((BOOLEAN)(0==1))

Reading through some other issues I've found this workaround: podman machine init -m 3072

podman 4.7.2
qemu 8.1.3_2
MacOs 14.1.1 - M3 Max

Reading through some other issues I've found this workaround: podman machine init -m 3072

Unfortunately no such luck on my end.

podman machine init -m 3072 solved the issue for me

podman 4.8.8
qemu 8.1.3_2
MacOs 14.1.1 - M3 pro

Reading through some other issues I've found this workaround: podman machine init -m 3072

Unfortunately no such luck on my end.

I didn't have any luck doing this initially either; then I absolutely nuked everything:

1. Killed all the podman related processes using Activity Monitor
2. Ran podman machine rm to delete the machine
3. Uninstalled podman, podman desktop, and qemu

Re-ran it all from scratch today, starting with podman only and then running podman desktop afterwards:

1. Reinstall podman & qemu
2. Run the command from jwhostet, then podman machine start and it worked
3. Open up podman desktop, everything looks good

podman 4.8.0
qemu 8.1.3_2
macos 14.1.1 M3 Max

I have a max, you have a pro, but one other person with a pro reported success so double-checking everything might be worth a shot? I tried similar steps before but skipped the podman machine rm step before and I deleted podman desktop by just dragging it to the trash before so that might have been why it failed the first time

@jaydorsey I have the same specs and followed your instructions. I am still unable to get the VM to run:
Waiting for VM ...

EDIT:
I installed brew install podman-desktop and enabled podman engine this way and it is working now 🤷🏽‍♂️

@jaydorsey I have the same specs and followed your instructions. I am still unable to get the VM to run: Waiting for VM ...

EDIT: I installed brew install podman-desktop and enabled podman engine this way and it is working now 🤷🏽‍♂️

This worked for me as well!
Additionally, I did the following before installing podman-desktop:

• brew uninstall podman
• brew uninstall qemu
• Removed any lingering podman files I could find:
  • Removed ~/.ssh/podman-machine-default and ~/.ssh/podman-machine-default.pub.
  • Removed ~/.local/share/containers and ~/.config/containers

One thing of maybe note: It worked great yesterday. I let my machine go to sleep, logged back on today, and the whole thing was locked up again list it was. Podman said it wasn't running, but it actually was, I can't delete images or machines, everything was essentially responsive. I tried force-quitting everything and restarting with no luck

I need to try a restart/reboot of my computer later to see if that fixes it but it didn't seem to work after I let my computer sleep (or perhaps some other unrelated reason, like a crash)

And now I'm seeming to have problems with volumes and my VM is somehow back in a "Currently starting" state. Can't stop, or remove it. 👎

I can confirm using the 8.1.3 version of qemu does allow the VM to start on a M1 on macOS 14.3 with podman 4.9.

QEMU 8.2.1 has been released and is available in brew. Hopefully this fixes this issue.

Can confirm that the update to QEMU 8.2.1 fixed the issue!!
I made sure to start with a clean slate so removed all the programs and folders/files as has been stated above.

Hey All,

Just did the following to make this work without downgrading (Thanks @cfergeau and @robahtou for the mention's):

Remove the Machine:

podman machine rm
...
Are you sure you want to continue? [y/N] y

# Press y to make sure to remove everything

Upgrade to the latest QEMU:

brew update && brew upgrade
...
==> Upgrading qemu
  8.2.0 -> 8.2.1

Re-Init your Podman Machine:

Extracting compressed file: podman-machine-default_fedora-coreos-39.20240112.2.0-qemu.aarch64.qcow2: done
Image resized.
Machine init complete
To start your machine run:

	podman machine start

Start your Podman Machine:

Starting machine "podman-machine-default"
Waiting for VM ...
Mounting volume... /Users:/Users
Mounting volume... /private:/private
Mounting volume... /var/folders:/var/folders

This machine is currently configured in rootless mode. If your containers
require root permissions (e.g. ports < 1024), or if you run into compatibility
issues with non-podman clients, you can switch using the following command:

        podman machine set --rootful

API forwarding listening on: /var/run/docker.sock
Docker API clients default to this address. You do not need to set DOCKER_HOST.

Machine "podman-machine-default" started successfully

This worked for me on M1, M2 and M3! 🥳

just want to update my issue, after upgrading QEMU to 8.2.1, the problem seems go away, tried using applehv but somehow if i did not set the amount of disk, it will took all of the available space and crippling my system, so upgrading QEMU works 👍 .

now i can pull and operate as usual

  version:
  APIVersion: 4.8.3
  Built: 1704291040
  BuiltTime: Wed Jan  3 21:10:40 2024
  GitCommit: ""
  GoVersion: go1.21.5
  Os: linux
  OsArch: linux/arm64
  Version: 4.8.3

QEMU emulator version 8.2.1
Copyright (c) 2003-2023 Fabrice Bellard and the QEMU Project developers

it will took all of the available space and crippling my system

I don't know what you saw exactly, but while it's true applehv will create a 100GB disk image, it is a sparse image, and it won't use 100GB on disk unless it's filled.
It's doing the equivalent of:

$ truncate -s 100G foo.img
$ du -sh foo.img
0

@cfergeau so the system prompt me with warning that i had low free space after initiatingpodman machine init using applehv as its image, during the extraction it took more than 100GB, i had like 130GB+ free space at that time, but all of them taken by the extraction.

@cfergeau so the system prompt me with warning that i had low free space after initiatingpodman machine init using applehv as its image, during the extraction it took more than 100GB, i had like 130GB+ free space at that time, but all of them taken by the extraction.

Turns out podman did not create sparse files when extracting its disk images, but that's been solved in the main branch.

I followed @benoitschipper's guide, fixed the problem. One more step I had to do is that I uninstalled homebrew and then install it back. The reason is that I migrated my Mac system from previous Intel cpu Mac Book Pro to a new M3 Mac Book Pro. When I ran the podman machine start command, it prompted that my qemu is a x86 binary. I tried to reinstall qemu but that didn't work. I solved the problem by purge existing homebrew, and reinstall it.

podman 5.0 no longer supports qemu on macos and uses the apple hypervisor by default.