My only experience with VMs on macOS is colima+docker, and it's relatively painful and inefficient (but usable).
Try Apple's container CLI. I moved a project of mine from colima+docker to it relatively easily, a couple of weekends ago.
How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
31–40 of 111 posts
Re: How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
#32>Starting with 4 virtual cores and 8 GB vRAM, where the VM ran perfectly briskly with around 5 GB of memory used, I stepped down to 3 cores and 6 GB, to discover that memory usage fell to 3.9 GB and everything worked well. With just 2 cores and 4 GB of memory only 3.1 GB of that was used, and the VM continued to handle those lightweight tasks normally. Good reminder that there's a certain amount of memory tied up wit…
As a general rule, also the amount of physical memory installed in a computer should be proportional with the number of hardware threads provided by its CPU.
Besides the fact that the operating system may allocate some memory for each thread, when you launch a multi-threaded application that is able to use all available threads, for instance the compilation of a big software project, it frequently will allocate some working memory in an amount proportional with the amount of working threads.
I have encountered many multi-threaded applications that need up to 2 GB per thread to work well.
This corresponds to having 64 GB for a desktop CPU with 32 threads, like Ryzen 9 9950X.
For the compilation example, I have seen software projects, like Chrome/Chromium and its derivatives, where if you do not have enough memory, proportional to the number of hardware threads, e.g. when you have only 32 GB for a 16 core/32 thread CPU, you must reduce the number of concurrent compilations, e.g. with an appropriate parameter to "make -j", leaving some threads and cores idle, because otherwise you may encounter out-of-memory errors.
Re: How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as macOS, is in fact, macOS/Darwin, or as I've recently taken to calling it, macOS plus Darwin." "What you're referring to as Darwin, is in fact, Darwin/XNU." "What you're referring to as XNU, is in fact, BSD/Mach." I seem to remember it being possible to run macOS-less Darwin several years ago, not sure if that's still possible or if Apple has modifi…
> several years ago 2024, maybe? needs some renewed interest perhaps: https://www.puredarwin.org/
Needs someone to pick it up: its project leader passed away last year.
Re: How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
#34I was hoping to see the bare macOS with all the applications removed as much as possible, no graphical user interface, just the bare minimum to boot, login as a user, and write hello world dot txt with a text editor. Or maybe some command line apps? Or is it no longer macOS at that point?
"I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as macOS, is in fact, macOS/Darwin, or as I've recently taken to calling it, macOS plus Darwin." "What you're referring to as Darwin, is in fact, Darwin/XNU." "What you're referring to as XNU, is in fact, BSD/Mach." I seem to remember it being possible to run macOS-less Darwin several years ago, not sure if that's still possible or if Apple has modifi…
https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu
Apple stopped updating this 5 years ago.
I remember getting it to boot once long ago but I didn't have anything to actually do with it.
Re: How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
#35[dead]
Re: How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
#36I was hoping to see the bare macOS with all the applications removed as much as possible, no graphical user interface, just the bare minimum to boot, login as a user, and write hello world dot txt with a text editor. Or maybe some command line apps? Or is it no longer macOS at that point?
You can boot regular macOS directly to a root terminal in “Single User Mode”. This was easier on Intel macs of yore but is also possible on M1+
Below content from https://eclecticlight.co/2020/11/28/startup-modes-for-m1-mac...
Launch 1 True Recovery, open Terminal, then run “bputil -a” (without the quotes) to downgrade system security and allow for more boot arguments. You might need to restart after this step.
Then, run [nvram boot-args=”-s”] (without the square brackets). Restart to launch Single User Mode.
Once in Single User Mode, run these commands (in the following order) to mount the root volume group:
1. mount -P 1
2. /usr/libexec/init_data_protection
3. mount -P 2
Future restarts will always launch Single User Mode first. To stop launching Single User Mode, run [nvram boot-args=“”] (without the square brackets).
To restore your system to full security, run “bputil -f” (without the quotes). If you choose to run that command in macOS, prefix “sudo” to the beginning.
Re: How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recently got a Mac Mini for local CI purposes (together with Forgejo Actions), took a broad look at the ecosystem and decided to just roll with "build on host" instead. Setting up signing/notarization just looked like an insurmountably task together with isolating it from the host, even with agents. At least the macOS builds are really fast now and the signing/notarization just ~200 lines of Bash...
> the signing/notarization just ~200 lines of Bash 200 lines?! That’s two orders of magnitude too many. What exactly are you doing that you need so such code for signing and notarisation?
From the top of my head, unlocking the keychain, finding the right identity, notarizing two parts, the binary itself and the .dmg that the .app ships in and some other stuff I'm sure. Can do a deeper look in a bit when I can. Most of the hassle is because it's 100% unattended and I had to do stuff to avoid GUI-prompts for passwords/unlocks, and that the Forgejo Runner has a different security context.
Re: How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as macOS, is in fact, macOS/Darwin, or as I've recently taken to calling it, macOS plus Darwin." "What you're referring to as Darwin, is in fact, Darwin/XNU." "What you're referring to as XNU, is in fact, BSD/Mach." I seem to remember it being possible to run macOS-less Darwin several years ago, not sure if that's still possible or if Apple has modifi…
https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu Apple stopped updating this 5 years ago. I remember getting it to boot once long ago but I didn't have anything to actually do with it.
Looks like it is still getting updates and has moved here: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu
Re: How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
GP is pretty accurate in my experience. Up until last year I was still running an Intel MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM and successfully multitasked with Blender, Illustrator, Unity, VS Code, and Firefox quite often. The math doesn't make sense, but all stayed responsive even with frequent hops between them. The only OOM events I ran into were memory leaks from Firefox, I believe from an extension.
There's nothing particularly interesting about that. Linux distro-of-your-choice can run the equivalents fine, as can Windows. Browse /r/macos if you dare to wade into the uninformed cesspool; it's full of OOTB apps causing OOMs (among 3rd party apps) with the past at least two major versions of macOS.
I think there is something interesting there. I was running lighter workloads on similar RAM when I daily drove Debian and was frequently brought to my knees by swapping to death. I had to make conscious choices and manage my RAM usage to avoid it, and still occasionally got T-boned by something I overlooked. I have never had to worry about that with macOS.
I admit I don't have much experience with how Windows handles constrained memory since XP, and XP was abysmal at it just by virtue of being far more bloated than an equivalent Linux distro. It's certainly far more bloated nowadays, but maybe it handles memory pressure better.
None of this should be construed to say that macOS doesn't have serious issues or that it's not in dire need of a Snow Leopard-esque "0 new features" release. That's tangential to its memory handling, where I haven't seen the issues you describe.
Re: How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
#40I'm wondering if the Xcode simulator (without Xcode running) performs as well, my 2020 Intel MacBook Air has been incapable of running Safari in iOS smoothly for nearly all its life.
Macbook Neo should run rings around any Intel Air: Geekbench shows it at 250% the score of 2020 Intel Air.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/17022784?baseli...