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Booting a macOS Apple Silicon Kernel in QEMU

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Re: Booting a macOS Apple Silicon Kernel in QEMU

#31

Post by george_perez »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #16
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hackintoshes from my experience are usually built as a low cost hobbyist alternative. Most people earning a living from a Mac will sacrifice speed to have stability and support. Plenty of people who want MacOS but cannot afford the official Mac will use it instead.

I need to build my software for macOS. On my Ryzen Threadripper running Linux, I can run a faster, more powerful KVM/QEMU version of Mojave than I can buy from Apple, while still having cores and RAM left for Linux. I could afford to buy hardware from Apple, but why would I when the cost/performance ratio for an embarrasingly parallel compute task like compiling is so much worse?

Like the previous person said, mainly stability and support. There's no doubt that macOS can run much faster in non-Apple hardware given certain parameters, but if you want support and solid stability you would probably go with Mac hardware.

Re: Booting a macOS Apple Silicon Kernel in QEMU

#32

Post by my123 »

tambourine_man wrote: post #4

This is some very cool hacking, but I’m more interested in knowing how Apple Silicon will run x86 Windows and Linux stuff. Can virtualization software get help from Rosetta 2? Or is QEMU and similar the best we can hope for?

For Linux guests:

_If you really need to_, Huawei provides the ExaGear Server translator for Linux at https://www.huaweicloud.com/kunpeng/software/exagear.html , which allows to run x86 and x86_64 apps on an arm64 Linux system, including Docker containers for their customers. That translator works pretty well in most cases.

Note however that you need to create a Huawei account to download this.

For Windows guests:

Run arm64 Windows, the JITs to run x86(_64) apps are included with the OS.

The VHDX for virtual machine use can be downloaded from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsins...

Re: Booting a macOS Apple Silicon Kernel in QEMU

#33

Post by skissane »

cmxch wrote: post #18
userbinator wrote: post #2

The fact that he even got that far with emulating what is essentially completely undocumented hardware is a very good sign, adding the rest of the hardware to QEMU might not be as hard as initially thought. This approach will help with none of these Don't underestimate the community -- a lot of Hackintosh (and emulation) stuff is done for the "just because I can" reasons, and getting a fully emulated ARM Mac working…

Not surprised given their attempt to run AIX on QEMU as well. That's slightly more documented but still a pain to do - as it requires specific versions of AIX(7.2 TL3 SP1/7.1 TL5 SP5).

I'd really like to see someone run IBM i (formerly known as OS/400) on QEMU. Has anyone tried?

Re: Booting a macOS Apple Silicon Kernel in QEMU

#34

Post by my123 »

octotoad wrote: post #30
Koshkin wrote: post #24

I am curious how or why this is different from trying to boot Darwin on aarch64.

Has any Darwin source release included ARM support yet? I thought they were still keeping this closed.

Yep, they started releasing the arm64 XNU source in 2017.

Funny tidbit: Raspberry Pi 3 is one of the supported platforms in the source dump.

Re: Booting a macOS Apple Silicon Kernel in QEMU

#35

Post by PragmaticPulp »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #29
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This speed advantage won’t apply when emulating Apple silicon on an x86-64 CPU, as discussed here. Emulating ARM on x86-64 is doable, but it has dramatically more overhead. It’s doubtful that a high core count would be enough to overcome this relative to just using Apple silicon.

My point was that the best use of hackintosh/VM tech is unrelated to "speed advantage". Apple has nothing that can touch a Threadripper for linearly scaled parallel workflows. The gap is so big that it might even overcome the arm/x86-64 emulation cost, though that wasn't what I was suggesting.

> The gap is so big that it might even overcome the arm/x86-64 emulation cost

I've spent a lot of time on this. With QEMU, the performance gap is huge right now.

I have several ARM/QEMU virtual machines running on my AMD virtualization server, but the emulation overhead makes everything painfully slow, even when assigning 20+ cores to the VM. I picked up an 8GB Raspberry Pi because it's often faster to run a workload on the Raspberry Pi than even the many-core AMD emulated system.

The emulation overhead across architectures is huge with QEMU.

Re: Booting a macOS Apple Silicon Kernel in QEMU

#36

Post by chongli »

userbinator wrote: post #2

The fact that he even got that far with emulating what is essentially completely undocumented hardware is a very good sign, adding the rest of the hardware to QEMU might not be as hard as initially thought. This approach will help with none of these Don't underestimate the community -- a lot of Hackintosh (and emulation) stuff is done for the "just because I can" reasons, and getting a fully emulated ARM Mac working…

Oh wow. Imagine a Hackintosh Raspberry Pi! Now that would be a cheap way to run macOS!

Re: Booting a macOS Apple Silicon Kernel in QEMU

#37

Post by skissane »

my123 wrote: post #32
tambourine_man wrote: post #4

This is some very cool hacking, but I’m more interested in knowing how Apple Silicon will run x86 Windows and Linux stuff. Can virtualization software get help from Rosetta 2? Or is QEMU and similar the best we can hope for?

For Linux guests: _If you really need to_, Huawei provides the ExaGear Server translator for Linux at https://www.huaweicloud.com/kunpeng/software/exagear.html , which allows to run x86 and x86_64 apps on an arm64 Linux system, including Docker containers for their customers. That translator works pretty well in most cases. Note however that you need to create a Huawei account to download this. For Windows guests: Ru…

Why use ExaGear, why not just use qemu-user-static?

Why would I want to use a (presumably) closed-source solution from Huawei whose documentation is only in Chinese, when I could instead use a well-known open source project with plentiful documentation in English?

Re: Booting a macOS Apple Silicon Kernel in QEMU

#40

Post by unnouinceput »

chongli wrote: post #36
userbinator wrote: post #2

The fact that he even got that far with emulating what is essentially completely undocumented hardware is a very good sign, adding the rest of the hardware to QEMU might not be as hard as initially thought. This approach will help with none of these Don't underestimate the community -- a lot of Hackintosh (and emulation) stuff is done for the "just because I can" reasons, and getting a fully emulated ARM Mac working…

Oh wow. Imagine a Hackintosh Raspberry Pi! Now that would be a cheap way to run macOS!

I run MacOS as cheapest as possible....inside a Vmware machine :)
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