Sharing

A machine's Sharing tab. Changes save at once and apply at the machine's next start.

#Shared folders

Share a Folder… picks a folder on the Mac; ✕ stops sharing it. New machines share your Downloads folder unless you turn that off (Settings, or when creating the machine).

Folders are shared with virtio-fs, so the guest reads and writes them directly — no network share, no syncing.

#In macOS guests

They appear by themselves in /Volumes/My Shared Files, one folder per share.

#In Linux guests

All shared folders are under one virtio-fs tag, vista:

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/vista
sudo mount -t virtiofs vista /mnt/vista
ls /mnt/vista            # Downloads/  …

Installing Vista Tools adds this mount to /etc/fstab, so it's there on every boot.

#Read-only shares

A share can be read-only: the guest can see the files but not change them. Agents set this with configure_machine (add_shares with readonly: true); folders added from the tab are read-write.

Every machine also sees a read-only share holding Vista Tools: the virtio-fs tag vistatools on Linux, and Vista Tools inside /Volumes/My Shared Files on macOS. It isn't listed in the tab.

#Clipboard

Linux guests share the clipboard with the Mac through the SPICE agent channel. The guest needs spice-vdagent, which most desktop distributions install already; if copying doesn't work, install it:

sudo apt install spice-vdagent       # Debian, Ubuntu, Kali
sudo dnf install spice-vdagent       # Fedora, CentOS, Rocky, AlmaLinux
sudo zypper install spice-vdagent    # openSUSE

The Virtualization framework doesn't offer clipboard sharing for macOS guests. Use a shared folder, or Vista Tools' file tools if you're an agent.

#Rosetta (Linux)

With Rosetta on, a Linux guest can run x86-64 Linux programs through Apple's Rosetta. It needs Rosetta installed on the Mac (macOS offers to install it the first time any Intel program runs, or softwareupdate --install-rosetta).

Inside the guest, mount it and register it as the handler for x86-64 binaries:

sudo mkdir -p /media/rosetta
sudo mount -t virtiofs rosetta /media/rosetta
sudo /usr/sbin/update-binfmts --install rosetta /media/rosetta/rosetta \
  --magic "\x7fELF\x02\x01\x01\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x02\x00\x3e\x00" \
  --mask "\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xfe\xfe\x00\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xfe\xff\xff\xff" \
  --credentials yes --preserve no --fix-binary yes

(Distributions without update-binfmts use systemd-binfmt with the same magic and mask.)

#Agent control

Agent control decides whether coding agents may control this machine through Vista's MCP server. Off, every agent tool refuses this machine and says why; list_machines still shows it. Settings → Agents turns agent control off for the whole Mac. See Agents.

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#Sharing