HTTPS failure with VMware Fusion 12 on macOS 11 Big Sur

[bahamat]

Since upgrading to macOS 11 Big Sur and VMware Fusion 12, booting assets over HTTPS has not been working. I tracked this down to side channel mitigations. These mitigation’s can be disabled under advanced settings, but be aware that this opens a security vulnerability allowing the VM to snoop data from the hypervisor OS or other VMs.

See the following notices for iPXE and VMware:

• https://ipxe.org/err/1c25e0
• https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/79832