Booting a macOS Apple Silicon Kernel in QEMU

Post by princekolt » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 11:00 AM UTC

m463 wrote: post #20

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…

I created a mac in a vm and then I used system migration tool to sort of upload my old macbook pro's consciousness into the cloud. https://youtu.be/86XqF5dqjYc pretty cool I've been thinking about resurrecting my machines with older versions of osx - I'll have to figure out how to boot say 10.11 or 10.12

Post by my123 » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 11:57 AM UTC

floatboth wrote: post #56

londons_explore wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to emulate the hardware directly. Since apples kernel is opensource, there's a good chance one could write a kernel driver for another GPU offering a sufficiently compatible interface. Nearly all GPU code will have software rendering fallbacks too, so the driver might just be enough to trigger those fallbacks.

At least with the previous versions of macOS you didn't have to do anything special, the software renderer would just work if you don't have a supported GPU.

Post by dreamcompiler » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #27

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #8

> Besides, Hackintoshes are often built when Apple’s own hardware isn’t fast enough; in this case, Apple’s ARM processors are already some of the fastest in the industry. They are also used when one wants more cores than are possible on Apple hardware. If you want a build engine for a medium to large sized compiled language project, Apple has no options that make economic sense, since a Ryzen Threadripper will beat e…

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.

Post by skykooler » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 3:33 PM UTC

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #13

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #8

> Besides, Hackintoshes are often built when Apple’s own hardware isn’t fast enough; in this case, Apple’s ARM processors are already some of the fastest in the industry. They are also used when one wants more cores than are possible on Apple hardware. If you want a build engine for a medium to large sized compiled language project, Apple has no options that make economic sense, since a Ryzen Threadripper will beat e…

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.

Post by LordDragonfang » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 7:08 PM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #66

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.

Is it not the case that x86 Chromebooks emulate the ARM ISA in order to run Android apps? There's certainly a slowdown but it's not horrible. How do they do it? Then again maybe they just have a good JVM and that solves most of the problem for Android apps?