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Running OS X Mavericks under QEMU with KVM

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Re: Running OS X Mavericks under QEMU with KVM

#73
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Every issue you described are issues from 2-3 years ago. Sorry, these issues were experienced by me this year . On hardware that is not defective as it works flawlessly on Windows. >They have all been solved, especially in the major distros. No they haven't. It has not been fixed. Neither my GPU issues nor my Audio issues have been fixed. >A current version 14.x of Ubuntu, or version 20+ of Fedora will work "out of…

Well, I"m sorry your experience was bad. I assure you, it is not normal what you are describing. Valve has (figuratively) bet the house on Linux as tomorrow's gaming platform... and I'm confident they would not have done so without Linux being ready for prime-time. As a note, don't game under WINE. WINE is great for applications and such, but a game designed to run on windows won't work quite right even on WINE. But,…

> I assure you, it is not normal what you are describing.

Phoronix seems to assure otherwise. It feels like every day I read about a minor performance bump with RadeonSI and then a 10fps regression. The proprietary drivers are clunky and don't seem to play nice with my multimonitor setup. Needless to say, my attempts on Ubuntu 14.04 this year on my very standard i5 3570K / AMD 7950 rig have not been very successful. I had this one awful text rendering bug (artifacting) with both the proprietary and apt-get open drivers. Only when I compiled Mesa from Git did I fix it. Taking a step back, running Hackintoshed OS X felt more reliable in the 3D graphics department, and I used it for over 6 months before dropping back to Windows 7 full time.

I wish, wish, wish to use Linux full time. I really do. I'm sure if I had older/integrated graphics hardware my problems would disappear. Unfortunately I need dedicated hardware to drive a dual link DVI (Korean 27") and two more HDMI/single link DVIs.

I'm sure the driver support will come with time. Maybe around the time Wayland/Mir take off. I'll be waiting. My MacBook is my rock, of course.

Re: Running OS X Mavericks under QEMU with KVM

#74
post #4
post #2

given that a lot of the work presented here was not "preliminary work that was adapted", but actually entirely made by him and copy and pasted by you, I think you could at least do him the courtesy of linking his site[1] and his work somewhere in the first sentence instead of a side note in the closing statement. Adapting his work in my opinion is not copy and pasting his work and adding a line or two in the middle.…

I was aware of this when posting. I am very thankful for that information and everyone who contributed to KVM, KVM-KMOD and QEMU repositories. I have moved the credit to the top of article. This was more as a reference and a quick guide (also because I couldn't achieve Mavericks via his research and therefore I have added it here). Thanks anyway.

What graphics card does Mac OS X think it's using when running in QEMU/KVM as you describe? Are you able to get different (more than 1200x800) resolutions? One of the major shortcomings of most of the "Mac OS X in a guest" efforts is that 3D hardware acceleration is disabled (unimplemented) in the guest video driver, which the Quartz compositing engine assumes will always be there. This results in weird video behavior, like certain things not showing up or for FLV video to not render in a web browser. Are you able to view web video with this Mac guest?

Re: Running OS X Mavericks under QEMU with KVM

#75
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every issue you described are issues from 2-3 years ago. They have all been solved, especially in the major distros. A current version 14.x of Ubuntu, or version 20+ of Fedora will work "out of the box" with zero tweaking. Honestly. (I run full-time Linux desktops on everything from old repourposed warehouse workstations that were bought in the windows 2000 days, all the way through dual booting my modern gaming rig.…

>Every issue you described are issues from 2-3 years ago. Sorry, these issues were experienced by me this year . On hardware that is not defective as it works flawlessly on Windows. >They have all been solved, especially in the major distros. No they haven't. It has not been fixed. Neither my GPU issues nor my Audio issues have been fixed. >A current version 14.x of Ubuntu, or version 20+ of Fedora will work "out of…

> It just didn't work properly.

I echo this 100%. Even after significant tweaking it wasn't smooth enough. I can handle lower FPS than Windows, but delays, full blown glitches, flat out incompatibilities just rule it out for me.

Re: Running OS X Mavericks under QEMU with KVM

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, trying to install OS X on a laptop is an exercise in frustration. I did it with Snow Leopard on a Dell Inspiron-1525, almost identical to a polycarbonate white MacBook of that time and one of the easiest machines to tinker with. I read elsewhere that desktop computers are much easier to work with, but the OP is explicitly talking about portability and, in that case, it is just better to shell out th…

I did it in about an hour or two, with most of the time being spent making the USB drive or actually installing. No problems. The catch is that I specifically found known-good laptops and then went and bought one. Ditto for the wifi card.

Could you share your source of known-good laptops?

Re: Running OS X Mavericks under QEMU with KVM

#77
post #51

Couple of notes: * It is easier to just install a Linux 3.15 kernel. I installed the latest RC on Ubuntu 14.04 and that did the trick. * You should not have to install Mountain Lion first. I made a Mavericks ISO using the script mentioned and it installed without any issues * The Qemu that ships with Ubuntu 14.04 is new enough. No need to compile your own. Those patches are pretty old and if your distro is up to date…

It would've been helpful if the guide mentioned the required KVM and Qemu versions by their version numbers. Users like me (Arch Linux, Gentoo etc.) and Ubuntu, Fedors users in the future could check and avoid installing from source.

Looking up qemu-kvm in Ubuntu 14.04 now, it's version "2.0.0~rc1+dfsg-0ubuntu3.1", which is similar to the version in my Debian Jessie/Testing machine (2.0.0+dfsg-6). Time to try this out, methinks.

Edit: try this out another time - you need access to an OSX machine to do various steps of the process.

Re: Running OS X Mavericks under QEMU with KVM

#78
post #19

I find it humerus that getting osx to run in a controlled environment, useful for testing simulation etc takes more hacking and more work than any Linux distro ever did, even in the early days. Despite this Mac people insists getting Linux to work is "hard" when it mostly works out of the box on any hardware. Amazing.

That's probably because it's so new in QEMU. VMWare, for one, have been able to do this for quite a while with the effort of ~1 mouseclick. Edit: Not sure if troll or not?! Getting Linux to run as a guest in Xen 0.0.1 probably took some work, too.

VMWare, for one, have been able to do this for quite a while with the effort of ~1 mouseclick.

Unless things have recently changed, this is factually incorrect. It might work on OSX, but that's not really the point, is it.

For whatever reason, you may want to be able to run a general purpose X86 OS on your general purpose X86 hardware, or general purpose X86 cloud/cluster.

For instance, getting OSX to run in a regular ESX cluster (for testing, etc) can't be done wtihout immense amount of hackery, and probably requires custom kext-files, injected on another machine before dumping the image and what not.

At this point poor compatibility is just that. I fail to see why someone would try to sell that as something good.

Re: Running OS X Mavericks under QEMU with KVM

#79

I find it humerus that getting osx to run in a controlled environment, useful for testing simulation etc takes more hacking and more work than any Linux distro ever did, even in the early days. Despite this Mac people insists getting Linux to work is "hard" when it mostly works out of the box on any hardware. Amazing.

Getting Linux to work on random hardware is certainly harder than getting OSX to run on Mac hardware. That's not an unfair comparison, because those are their intended use cases. You're looking at a Porsche and bitching that it sucks at offroading. Well, yeah. That's not what it's for. If you work offroad and need to carry cargo, a Porsche is not the vehicle for you, but that doesn't mean it's a bad car.

That's not an unfair comparison, because those are their intended use cases. You're looking at a Porsche and bitching that it sucks at offroading.

Your comparison would make more sense if it was about making a car made by Porsche drive on roads not made by Porsche. Which everyone agrees is absolutely reasonable.

What you're trying to sell me is the idea that poor compatibility is a feature? It was designed to have poor compatibility despite being built for a standardized platform, so that makes it a porsche?

When I try to get OSX running in our VMWare cluster so that we have clonable, snapshottable machines for testing and debugging and it takes a week of effort not getting it working, you're telling me that's a "feature"?

Yeah, sorry. I don't buy that.

Re: Running OS X Mavericks under QEMU with KVM

#80
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much so not true: http://fedoraproject.org/ http://www.ubuntu.com/ Download an ISO and install it. I think you will be surprised. Pop the disk in after burning to a CD/DVD. Click "install", reboot and you are done. Doesn't matter what your hardware is... it will install and work. Other than getting a computer with a pre-installed OS, it really can't get much simpler. Modern Linux Desktops do not require you to d…

It's at least 100x more difficult than opening a laptop screen and it already being done.

How do you do that in VMWare ESX?
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