We benchmarked vmnet-helper with 3 VM types (vfkit, krunkit, qemu) in all operation modes supported by the vmnet framework (shared, bridged, host), in 3 directions (host to vm, vm to host, vm to vm), on 3 machines (iMac M3, MacBook Pro M2 Max, MacBook Pro M5).
See the performance directory for full test results and the development guide for running your own benchmarks.
Comparing to socket_vmnet with lima using VZ and qemu vm types, vmnet-helper with vfkit is up to 10 times faster, and vmnet-helper with qemu is up to 3 times faster. See similar tools for a detailed comparison.
Tested on iMac M3 and macOS 15.6.1.
Performance depends on VM type and transfer direction. vfkit performs better in all tests. qemu is up to 5 times slower than vfkit.
Tested on MacBook Pro M5 and macOS 26.5.2.
With offloading enabled, krunkit provides close to native performance.
Tested on MacBook Pro M5 and macOS 26.5.2.
Important
For best performance do not mix VMs using offloading and VMs not using offloading on the same bridge. This disables TSO on the bridge, which degrades TX performance to 1.5 Gbits/sec.
On macOS 26 and later, VMs using the Virtualization framework can use vmnet natively via vmnet-broker, without vmnet-helper in the data path. Native vmnet is up to 2 times faster compared to krunkit with offloading, and up to 9 times faster compared to krunkit without offloading. Only shared network is supported in native vmnet mode.
Tested on iMac M3 and macOS 26.3.0.