You also get 10% better battery life when running a VM, and can set your virtual machines to automatically return disk space when they are shut down. It launches twice as fast as before, handles DirectX content at a 20% better speed and delivers 75% better “git status” when running Linux. The move away from kernel extensions in favor of native virtualization code has helped deliver useful performance improvements. “Parallels invested more than 25-man-years of engineer programming to take full advantage of the new macOS Big Sur architecture and revamped kernel extensions to deliver our best Windows-on-Mac performance ever for our Parallels Desktop 16 customers,” said Nick Dobrovolskiy, Parallels Senior Vice President of Engineering and Support in a statement. As a result of the abandonment of such extensions on the Mac, the company had to dedicate a great deal of energy to replace them with native Mac virtualization code. One major change in Big Sur is the removal of support for third-party kernel extensions (kexts), which is what Parallels relied on for its emulation.
