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OS X-KVM: Running Mac OS X El Capitan on KVM and QEMU

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Re: OS X-KVM: Running Mac OS X El Capitan on KVM and QEMU

#31
post #9
post #6

Is it possible to run several OS' on a single machine with fast switching between them, access to all hardware, and at full or almost full speed?

Using Vmware, and passthrough for the videocard you can achieve this with Linux as the host and Windows as the guest. Not sure if it's possible with OSX. What we really need are video drivers for OSX, for virtualbox and/or other virtualisation solutons, so OSX as a guest can work really well.

VGA passthrough is also possible with KVM. I wonder if Oracle has any plans to add it to VirtualBox? It seems they have made room for KVM support, so in theory they could.

I have seen all OSX versions from Leopard to El Capitan successfully running as a VB guest, but the graphics support has always been bad, since there are no Guest Additions for OSX (BTW this also means no bidirectional clipboard, drag & drop of files, etc..)

Re: OS X-KVM: Running Mac OS X El Capitan on KVM and QEMU

#33
post #10
post #6

Is it possible to run several OS' on a single machine with fast switching between them, access to all hardware, and at full or almost full speed?

Up to a point. There's Hardware Partitioning in which the hardware allows you to specify which processors or memory are dedicated to which OS but there's little dynamic sharing. The only real way to do dynamic resource sharing is with software virtualization (which does still require hardware features, but many platforms support this nowadays) where either the OSes run under a Hypervisor layer, or one OS runs in a vi…

So, what would be the best solution to run three (Fedora, Windows 8 or 10 and OSX or more) OS' under a common hypervisor and achieve (almost) full speed? Or alternatively, Fedora as main and the other ones as VMs, but also with (almost) full speed and graphics acceleration.

Re: OS X-KVM: Running Mac OS X El Capitan on KVM and QEMU

#34
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write software for free and as a living, so I surely take it seriously. How can a software developer justify stealing software, unless they're trapped in a poor or technologically restricted situation (Cuba)? EDIT: There's some confusion as to what I replied to: My reply is to this Who actually takes software licenses seriously in their own home? If this doesn't imply one's okay with stealing, then I take my commen…

> How can a software developer justify stealing software Oh come on. Running a legally obtained OSX installation on hardware you own is hardly stealing. I don't see why OSX "fanboys" constantly bring up this tiresome meme about OSX being this near "holy" OS which cannot run on anything but this similarly holy Apple hardware. It's a generic consumer OS designed to work on what is mostly run of the mill X86 hardware. G…

[deleted]

Re: OS X-KVM: Running Mac OS X El Capitan on KVM and QEMU

#35
post #23
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I ended up just scripting Messages.app on a real Mac and that works really well, even 2 years after. I remote control my house that way. That sounds pretty neat, do you have more details written down anywhere?

I've installed an AppleScript handler from within Messages.app. The script below is called ReceiveMessage.script and is located in ~/Library/Application Scripts/com.apple.iChat and basically accepts messages. That's how I handle inbound messages, and for outbound I basically also have a separate script for sending out messages. I do the actual work in separate python scripts called by the shell scripts though. -- sni…

The formatting got borked, but this is very cool. Could I contact you to get additional details?

Edit: my email is in my profile

Re: OS X-KVM: Running Mac OS X El Capitan on KVM and QEMU

#36
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up to a point. There's Hardware Partitioning in which the hardware allows you to specify which processors or memory are dedicated to which OS but there's little dynamic sharing. The only real way to do dynamic resource sharing is with software virtualization (which does still require hardware features, but many platforms support this nowadays) where either the OSes run under a Hypervisor layer, or one OS runs in a vi…

So, what would be the best solution to run three (Fedora, Windows 8 or 10 and OSX or more) OS' under a common hypervisor and achieve (almost) full speed? Or alternatively, Fedora as main and the other ones as VMs, but also with (almost) full speed and graphics acceleration.

A KVM Hypervisor would be ideal, in my experience and opinion. Using the virtio drivers will give you great performance for virtualized devices like disks and NICs, and you can also directly attach devices and use PCI passthrough to achieve full-native performance for a device in the guest OS.

Re: OS X-KVM: Running Mac OS X El Capitan on KVM and QEMU

#38

I tried doing this the other day, hoping that I would finally be able to get a working OSX setup on my desktop (have made several attempts with no success at getting it working bare-metal on my Z600). Sadly it just ended with more kernel panics, something I was hoping would be avoided as I got the impression from some sources that QEMU was a more straightforward solution than trying to run it on bare-metal. Having sa…

   Z600
That's a bit old. Modern Hackentoshes are actually pretty solid on consumer hardware. Z79/Z79, Z170 are pretty much fully supported. Some forum posters claim they've gotten dual 4th Xeon boards to work.

I set one up on my Z79+i7-4790k. It was a breeze. Took about 90minutes following tutorials. My biggest problems were:

-I set up the wrong sound driver

-Nvidia won't detect/modify hot plugging displays you have to manually edit OSX's version of xorg.conf

-Apple's Nvidia driver didn't support GSync or 144Hz. So I had to dealing with image tearing :\

-Non Apple keyboards had weird character mismatching. Had to purchase an Apple USB keyboard.

I ended up reverting because I like my IBM Model M, and losing hardware level vsync was a no-go.

Re: OS X-KVM: Running Mac OS X El Capitan on KVM and QEMU

#39

I tried doing this the other day, hoping that I would finally be able to get a working OSX setup on my desktop (have made several attempts with no success at getting it working bare-metal on my Z600). Sadly it just ended with more kernel panics, something I was hoping would be avoided as I got the impression from some sources that QEMU was a more straightforward solution than trying to run it on bare-metal. Having sa…

I clean installed macOS Sierra on my 2013 Macbook Air this week it seems just fine to me. So far, I only have a couple of issues with it:

1) more bloat (but almost every OS has this problem).

2) cuts off support for some older Macs for no good reason.

One thing I really like the new default terminal font: San Francisco Mono. I don't know if that font is new to the OS entirely but I really like it.

I also really like that you can have the Finder sort folders before files. This should have been added a long time ago, but better late than never.

Re: OS X-KVM: Running Mac OS X El Capitan on KVM and QEMU

#40

The OSX license agreement severely limits the practicality of this: http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOS1012.pdf It only allows you: Section 2B(iii): "to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments on each Mac Computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software, for purposes of: (a) software development…

Look, from a legal perspective this is a matter of civil procedure. For Apple to enforce this agreement it has to first discover your usage and then prove its damages in a court. The damages would likely be the cost of Mac hardware of equivalent power to the VMs plus legal fees.

What this means is that no one should spin up a server farm of OS X VMs and then blog about it. For everyone else, Apple is not going to discover you and if they do they are not going to pursue damages against you for the cost of a Mac Mini. Apple is just not out there doing that type of lawsuit

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