Virtualisation on Apple Silicon question :

I know there was a developer preview release of VirtualBox some time ago (about a year?) so people could fire up virtualbox VMs on their M1/M2 chip based Macs. But looking at virtualbox.org today, this seems gone/discontinued? 

Also I note VMWare does exist for Apple Silicon but it's not really free (there's a "personal use" edition, I think which is FOC but not quite "free").

Is there a Free vm hypervisor for Apple Silicon? 

 UTM (https://mac.getutm.app/) uses QEMU and makes use of the macOS virtualization framework so you get some bonus features like making use of Rosetta to run x86. 

 Oh that is lovely looking.

Not quite free, but very cheap. And looks like it's reasonably well maintained. OK this is a great answer thank you. 

 well, you can manually install it instead of using the app store version and then it is free

app store version supports author and gets you auto updates