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Osx-kvm: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

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Re: Osx-kvm: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#71

Post by tom_ »

exabrial wrote: post #47

Le sigh, continuous integration of osx and iOS apps is near impossible using standard cloud providers. I would gladly take an osx geared towards the data center.

I use Travis CI for the OS X build of my open source project. I build for OS X 10.7 but it looks like you get a good set of other stuff, iOS included: https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/reference/osx/#xcode-version

I think you may have to pay them to use it for closed source stuff. Not sure about setting it up to run on-site or whatever.

Setup was sort-of quite easy, because I just ignored their CI system, however it works, and made the build run the same Python script I already used on my own Mac to make .dmgs - but it was still a bit painful in places, as their deployment options had some limitations, and the documentation wasn't always clear. But the end result does what I'd hoped for: master gets built, packaged, and uploaded to web site; build branch gets built, packaged, and pushed as a GitHub release.

(For Windows I use AppVeyor. Mostly similar experience, but one advantage: they'll host your build artefacts for you, though presumably up to some limit. Good for the non-release day-to-day builds, as I like to have a decent set of these but don't really care about keeping them indefinitely.)

Re: Osx-kvm: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#72

Post by tinus_hn »

loxias wrote: post #33
tinus_hn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That must have been a long time ago indeed because the last version you could 'buy' was removed from sale in 2013. But actually you didn't buy a copy, you bought a disc and a license to upgrade the software on one 'Apple branded machine'. I don't care if you run unlicensed software but it's not 'legally purchased' or 'non pirated'. You're just fooling yourself.

You have a partial point, and I may have been sloppy with my words. But on the whole, you do not, and while I might willingly fool myself about a great many things, this is not one of them. I'm well aware that the license agreement claims to forbid running it on non Apple hardware. However, no -- the software WAS "legally purchased" AND "not pirated". I purchased, from Apple.com, a mac-mini, then in the apple app sto…

Congratulations, you have fooled yourself. You don’t have to put a lot of effort into convincing me that you didn’t because it doesn’t matter, I don’t care.

Re: Osx-kvm: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#73

Post by thcleaner »

SXX wrote: post #56
thcleaner wrote: post #43

I have a setup running OSX via QEMU/KVM using this guide. But memory operations seems to be very limited.

Can you give an example? I compile a lot of stuff in my macOS VM and there basically no performance loss.

I ran geekbench 4, the overall score was only 15-25% lower but the memory score was a lot lower like 80% lower

Re: Osx-kvm: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#74

Post by danShumway »

loxias wrote: post #5
arendtio wrote: post #2

Previous post from 2016 with 89 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12556609

Yeah, one has been able to do this for some time now. A few years ago I had a setup where (and I admit much of this was for the aesthetic purity of it, not practical reasons), I used a legally purchased copy of macos, copied it unmodified to my VM server, and, with a decent amount of effort, and a patched qemu (for the SMC thingie -- i donno if by now the patch is in mainline), was enjoying a non pirated, non modifie…

> A more challenging project I did later (which I probably deserve some derision for not documenting and sharing) is "How to develop, sign, and upload iOS apps entirely from debian linux, entirely with F/OSS, no VM, no Xcode, just good ol' emacs and cmake".

Please write this blog post. I've no interest in running Mac OS for any reason other than to test software in it and use it as a developer account for cross-platform apps. This would be a huge boon to people like me.

Re: Osx-kvm: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#75

Post by loxias »

tinus_hn wrote: post #72
loxias wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a partial point, and I may have been sloppy with my words. But on the whole, you do not, and while I might willingly fool myself about a great many things, this is not one of them. I'm well aware that the license agreement claims to forbid running it on non Apple hardware. However, no -- the software WAS "legally purchased" AND "not pirated". I purchased, from Apple.com, a mac-mini, then in the apple app sto…

Congratulations, you have fooled yourself. You don’t have to put a lot of effort into convincing me that you didn’t because it doesn’t matter, I don’t care.

Heh, it's just like before, you're almost there but....

No, no... While I'll admit the truth, that I certainly put more effort into attempting to be understandable than I normally do, I believe you missed the reason why. If you use simple theory of mind maybe then it'll make sense to you.

I've never tried to "convince you" as you say, what would I get out of it, and also, if someone like you is determined to see the sky as green, they'll see green no matter how many blue skies you show them.

I know i don't "fool myself", it's not actually even plausible enough to be taken seriously, like, i donno, like if i suddenly claimed to be the best pitcher in the NL. :) but everyone knows that, and I bet you do too.

What I was hoping I could help you see is there is a difference between a pedantic strict ruleset, like, say, laws, and human truths. and that we are to be their masters, not the other way around. Because if you go through life only seeing things through the lens you want to see, you'll miss out of a lot of cool stuff, not to mention, if past history means anything, often ending up on the wrong side of it :/

I donno, I do admit that I have the aspie trait that it's hard for me to just smile and nod to make someone go away, because i think (well, most) humans deserve respect. What you're misinterpreting as "effort to convince" I think the correct term would be is "altruistically try to help". I don't know you, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't feel bad at least trying to help.

Anyway, best, regardless.

maybe try to remember -- fooling yourself is being in denial about something, I think if you reread what I said before it'll click that that's not going on.

Re: Osx-kvm: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#77

Post by supernes »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #62

I've been running my macOS desktop in an ESXi VM for over a year now. I came from a hackintosh, but got tired of the fragility of some upgrades. Some notes on this setup: - Apple supports macOS running inside of ESXi. Officially, only on Apple host hardware (i.e. a Mac Pro, which is on the ESXi compatibility list). Apple even ships a VMXNet3 network driver in macOS. - For ESXi specifically, you have to patch the host…

Can you please elaborate on your GPU passthrough setup? I was under the impression that NVIDIA have explicit checks to see if you're trying to virtualize a consumer brand GPU and throw an error in that case.

I have a PC with a GTX 970 that I wanted to try a similar install on, unfortunately the i5-3570K in there doesn't support VT-d from what I can tell.

Re: Osx-kvm: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#78

Post by kbenson »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #62

I've been running my macOS desktop in an ESXi VM for over a year now. I came from a hackintosh, but got tired of the fragility of some upgrades. Some notes on this setup: - Apple supports macOS running inside of ESXi. Officially, only on Apple host hardware (i.e. a Mac Pro, which is on the ESXi compatibility list). Apple even ships a VMXNet3 network driver in macOS. - For ESXi specifically, you have to patch the host…

I remember a long time ago (maybe close to a decade?) I was looking into this a bit because I was interested in iPhone dev, and the requirement that that toolchain use Mac hardware was hard for me to swallow. It still seemed fairly hacky at that point, and ultimately I wasn't willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for a dev license and hardware just to see if it was worth it and I wasn't willing to go that far into the weeds on a commercial closed source platform where any problem I might have would likely be ignored with prejudice.

It's good to know they support some form of virtualization now. Do you know it they support any of the consumer grade virtualization systems? Even if I had to pay for a full macOS license (I think it wasn't nearly as cheap then either) and a developer license, that would have probably been much easier to swallow, and could have led to more hardware investment from me later if things worked out.

Re: Osx-kvm: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#80

Post by matthew-wegner »

supernes wrote: post #77
matthew-wegner wrote: post #62

I've been running my macOS desktop in an ESXi VM for over a year now. I came from a hackintosh, but got tired of the fragility of some upgrades. Some notes on this setup: - Apple supports macOS running inside of ESXi. Officially, only on Apple host hardware (i.e. a Mac Pro, which is on the ESXi compatibility list). Apple even ships a VMXNet3 network driver in macOS. - For ESXi specifically, you have to patch the host…

Can you please elaborate on your GPU passthrough setup? I was under the impression that NVIDIA have explicit checks to see if you're trying to virtualize a consumer brand GPU and throw an error in that case. I have a PC with a GTX 970 that I wanted to try a similar install on, unfortunately the i5-3570K in there doesn't support VT-d from what I can tell.

Those checks are at the driver level, and only for Windows (you can circumvent them by not exposing VM cpuid details to the guest).

On macOS I haven't done anything special. Kepler cards work out of box, and other cards just need NVIDIA's own web drivers installed. Even on real Mac Pro hardware, those drivers are notoriously bad. They're tied to explicit macOS updates, so most people use something like this to patch older versions if new releases have issues: https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/nvidia-update

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