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OS X-KVM: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

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Re: OS X-KVM: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#41

Post by philistine »

edude03 wrote: post #24
luzeal wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By complicated, I mean that you have to modify your the default behavior of your host OS (which by default will grab any hardware) and pick a GPU that is supported by the guest OS. People with Nvidia GPUs cannot do that for macOS. Ideally, out-of-the-box, with a few clicks, most people including non-tech savy ones should be able to enjoy 3D acceleration in their VM, regardless of their host configuration. Besides, in…

> Besides, in the long term, Apple is likely to drop support for AMD or Intel GPU in their OS Off topic but I’m curious about this. On one hand I think it’s a very Apple like thing to do but on the other hand it would practically kill Mac for pro use cases, which is barely hanging on by a thread right now. Could you imagine buying a $10,000+ workstation and Apple telling you 1 8k display is enough? I think it really…

You correlate an Apple GPU with a hard limit on the amount of displays you can use, but honestly I don't see the point. Apple has bittersweet limits on the amount of displays one can connect right now, but it is no guarantee that this will continue in the future.

With what they unveiled in terms of GPU performance with the Macbook Pro, the writing's on the wall; Apple is not going to support third-party GPUs going forward. The Mac Pro will only offer Apple CPUs and GPUs, I'm sure of it.

Re: OS X-KVM: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#43

Post by niklasrde »

aasasd wrote: post #33

This looks new-ish, but I remember seeing something about OSX on KVM years ago. The author's name seems familiar for some reason, however. Found it, the same repo linked in August 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17763855 And September 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12556609 Apparently the version control model of the repo is ‘scrap everything once in a while’.

"Removed history to reduce repository size"

Re: OS X-KVM: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#44

Post by lloeki »

nly wrote: post #31
lloeki wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ARM CPU would still have to be emulated on x86_64, which would be ungodly slow.

There's no reason to believe this has to be slower than x86 on ARM

Well, emulating† x86 on ARM is excruciatingly slow, just as emulating ARM on x86 is (turns out I do both, routinely, so no need to believe when I have data: it's about an order of magnitude slower than native)

† Rosetta 2 is not emulation.

Re: OS X-KVM: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#46

Post by smoldesu »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #42

What's the argument that this is OK from an ethical or moral perspective? Or does everyone acknowledge it's a willful violation of Apple's intellectual property and doesn't actually care?

I never read the EULA when I put MacOS on my Thinkpad, so I'd file it under "willful ignorance" if I were you.

Re: OS X-KVM: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#47

Post by bigyellow »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #42

What's the argument that this is OK from an ethical or moral perspective? Or does everyone acknowledge it's a willful violation of Apple's intellectual property and doesn't actually care?

We talking about the same Apple that is accused of child labor and other human rights abuses?

Re: OS X-KVM: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#48

Post by smoldesu »

lloeki wrote: post #44
nly wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason to believe this has to be slower than x86 on ARM

Well, emulating† x86 on ARM is excruciatingly slow, just as emulating ARM on x86 is (turns out I do both, routinely, so no need to believe when I have data: it's about an order of magnitude slower than native) † Rosetta 2 is not emulation.

Emulating x86 is slow on ARM because it's inherently a less complex instruction set. Emulating things the other way around is dead-simple by comparison, it's what made it such a cakewalk to write Nintendo Switch emulators on x86. ARM has to swing up the abstraction chain to implement x86 instructions, whereas x86 can execute ARM instructions for cheap, free, or even faster than ARM natively in the case of SIMD calls.

Plus, that's ignoring how people will actually try to get MacOS running on these machines. Once x86 is finally considered "dead" and removed from the MacOS ecosystem, the solution is going to be kernel patching. It's hard to speculate on how difficult this might be, but I'd imagine that a small team could port binary patches from BSD to Nu-Mac fairly quickly. It's not a particularly complicated process, just a mite arduous.

Re: OS X-KVM: Run macOS on QEMU/KVM

#49

Post by pxc »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #42

What's the argument that this is OK from an ethical or moral perspective? Or does everyone acknowledge it's a willful violation of Apple's intellectual property and doesn't actually care?

Intellectual property is a social fiction devised to serve certain ends in society, and it's one that these days is largely shaped (i.e., laws have literally rewritten) by huge corporations (e.g., Disney, Apple) to serve their own commercial interests.

EULA enforcement is not a matter of acknowledging some holy natural right, and onerous EULAs are not only ethically but often legally dubious themselves.

That projects like this are meaningfully harmful is the proposition requiring argument or justification, imo.

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