QEMU 6.2 introduces full hypervisor support for M1 Macs. I've installed ARM Ubuntu Server in a VM on my MacBook, and wrote a blog post explaining it. It uses libvirt to start the VM in headless mode.

https://www.naut.ca/blog/2021/12/09/arm64-vm-on-macos-with-l...

And this is the script to force QEMU to run on the M1 efficiency cores to save battery life:

https://github.com/yoonsikp/vm_configs/blob/master/power_sav...

Can we also use QEMU to emulate M1 Macs on i86 hardware?

Probably this fork[1] could be a good starting point.

[1] https://github.com/alephsecurity/xnu-qemu-arm64