6 ms·

Catalina VM

75 points by chmaynard 6y ago

jagger27 6y ago
If you’re not using it to run Xcode what’s the point?
- cle 6y ago
  I do this because my family is locked in to iMessage and FaceTime, and to test programs that I write to ensure they work on Macs.
  - swiley 6y ago
    Is there really no way to reverse engineer the iMessage protocol? Or is it just difficult and no one is motivated. I'm in a similar situation where my family and some of my friends only want to talk over iMessage. Last time my iphone wasn't available for a while I had to spend a couple hours pirating OSX and fiddling with a bunch of hackintosh tools just to talk to the girl I was dating at the time.
    - jmnicolas 6y ago
      > just to talk to the girl I was dating at the time You mean she wouldn't talk to you if it wasn't on iMessage? That's not love (or friendship for that matter). I would use smoke signals, learn sign language, use Morse or whatever is necessary to communicate with my love.
      - swiley 6y ago
        It's not that she would have refused, we just got so used to using imessage that we didn't have a working backup (we had sent emails but that's not always reliable.) We lived hours apart and I needed the address of the place we planned on meeting the next day (she had already sent it, but over imessage.)
- chmaynard 6y ago
  It's a hack. The best hacks are intrinsically interesting. Their only purpose is to satisfy one's curiosity. They don't need to have a point. :)
- newhouseb 6y ago
  Also you can't run anything Metal-based by default (which is a lot of things on macOS these days). You can theoretically PCI passthrough a GPU, but we're not to the point where you can use GVT-g based Intel passthrough to get something functioning. Such magic has seemed "very close" for a number of years now [1] 1. https://gist.github.com/artizirk/28aa4c28b252bd679a4daf84d919a175 https://gist.github.com/artizirk/28aa4c28b252bd679a4daf84d91...
- ngcazz 6y ago
  Audio Units... the most annoying vendor lock-in ever.
- _def 6y ago
  I just installed macos in a VM a few hours ago to test cross platform builds
- solarkraft 6y ago
  Audio software, Video software, Graphics software, plus pretty decent UX.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
joshchaney 6y ago
There's two articles [1] now on the front page of HN from this bit-101.com domain and they both seem pretty basic for HN. The other one is just about some guy installing a third party CPU cooler. No new tech, nothing interesting about the cooler, he just found it works better than the stock one. This article walks through using a shell script he found on GitHub to virtualize MacOS and his install and his very unscientific opinions on performance. Where's the beef? 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24599832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24599832
- chmaynard 6y ago
  From the HN Guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." Oh, and I think you meant "There are two articles".
- chmod775 6y ago
  > pretty basic for HN HN is not a homogeneous mass anymore and not everyone has experience with everything already. > Where's the beef? The usefulness of this article probably depends on what you take away from it. That you can viably run OSX in a VM was certainly news to me.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bit-101 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm the author of those articles. Sorry they are not beefy enough for you, but I'm not the one submitting them here. In fact, HN is not a site I usually visit at all. This is just my personal blog where I post stuff that I find interesting.
TooCleverByHalf 6y ago
> I’ve been considering building a “Hackintosh” system. But with Apple’s plans of going to ARM possibly by the end of this year, I don’t want to invest a lot in hardware that’s going to be obsolete soon. This argument doesn't make much sense to me. While not all hardware works with the goal of building a hackintosh. Plenty of top of the line hardware does and will run Windows just fine if ARM becomes an issue.
- aloknnikhil 6y ago
  You generally build a hackintosh machine with parts that are most compatible with MacOS and not necessarily the best bang for buck. So, I agree with the argument from the article here. If ARM makes the build obsolete, then all you now have is a Windows machine that you did not spend your money wisely on.
  - hellisothers 6y ago
    Have you built a Hackintosh? I have, the only two parts that require any consideration are the Motherboard and the GPU, and even then enough Motherboards are fine as to say really the only consideration is the GPU. I admit you pretty much have to use a stock AMD GPU, if you’re ok with essentially this one requirement then you’re set, if not then yea you didn’t spend your money wisely.
    - kitsunesoba 6y ago
      A lot of AIB cards work too, for example the Sapphire 5700XT Nitro+ is popular for hackintoshing. There are a handful that don't (usually because the GPU vendor decided to make some funky design change), both those surface pretty quickly after the release of a new model and are easy to avoid.
    - aloknnikhil 6y ago
      Well, I did build a hackintosh and the parts you claim need to be fixed are exactly the parts I claim are not spent wisely on. You're paying for compatibility not performance. I mean the AMD offerings are no where near Nvidia, particularly with the release of the 3000 series. But you have to settle with AMD for compatibility.
sumanthvepa 6y ago
Running macOS in a VM that is not running on a Mac is a violation of your contract with Apple. However, there are no restrictions on running a macOS VM on a mac. This can be very useful if you are a developer who needs to test on older macOS versions. I use VirtualBox running on a Mac, although I believe KVM/QEMU also works on a mac. (on Intel Macs -- this won't work in the future with Apple Silicon) for testing on older macOS versions. As usual with advice on the internet: caveat lector. I'm not a lawyer.
varbhat 6y ago
https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
In 2006 or 7 I played around with OS X Tiger in a VM from Windows and it was like a portal into a much more advanced operating system. It was the beginning of me moving entirely to OS X over time. At the time, almost everyone was on XP and Tiger was very impressive. Looking back, most of the advantages of Tiger were audiovisual in nature. But the vastly better command line was also a big deal.
divbzero 6y ago
GitHub Actions provide another option for testing against macOS: See action-tmate [1] and fastmac [2] for reference, as well as previous discussion on HN [3]. [1]: https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate [2]: https://github.com/fastai/fastmac https://github.com/fastai/fastmac [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24452384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24452384
in_ab 6y ago
I have used this set up in the past. With GPU, NVMe and USB passthrough it feels pretty much native. There are definitely some caveats. You can't just passthrough any GPU. Post High Sierra AMD has the best support. Select Nvidia GPUs like the GT 710 still work, but it doesn't do hardware video decoding. I could never get sleep to work either. With Apple moving towards ARM in the future, I thought of giving Linux another shot. It's not as polished but so far has been adequate.

Catalina VM

75 points by chmaynard 6y ago

jagger27 6y ago

If you’re not using it to run Xcode what’s the point?

cle 6y ago
I do this because my family is locked in to iMessage and FaceTime, and to test programs that I write to ensure they work on Macs.
- swiley 6y ago
  Is there really no way to reverse engineer the iMessage protocol? Or is it just difficult and no one is motivated. I'm in a similar situation where my family and some of my friends only want to talk over iMessage. Last time my iphone wasn't available for a while I had to spend a couple hours pirating OSX and fiddling with a bunch of hackintosh tools just to talk to the girl I was dating at the time.
  - jmnicolas 6y ago
    > just to talk to the girl I was dating at the time You mean she wouldn't talk to you if it wasn't on iMessage? That's not love (or friendship for that matter). I would use smoke signals, learn sign language, use Morse or whatever is necessary to communicate with my love.
    - swiley 6y ago
      It's not that she would have refused, we just got so used to using imessage that we didn't have a working backup (we had sent emails but that's not always reliable.) We lived hours apart and I needed the address of the place we planned on meeting the next day (she had already sent it, but over imessage.)
chmaynard 6y ago
It's a hack. The best hacks are intrinsically interesting. Their only purpose is to satisfy one's curiosity. They don't need to have a point. :)
newhouseb 6y ago
Also you can't run anything Metal-based by default (which is a lot of things on macOS these days). You can theoretically PCI passthrough a GPU, but we're not to the point where you can use GVT-g based Intel passthrough to get something functioning. Such magic has seemed "very close" for a number of years now [1] 1. https://gist.github.com/artizirk/28aa4c28b252bd679a4daf84d919a175 https://gist.github.com/artizirk/28aa4c28b252bd679a4daf84d91...
ngcazz 6y ago
Audio Units... the most annoying vendor lock-in ever.
_def 6y ago
I just installed macos in a VM a few hours ago to test cross platform builds
solarkraft 6y ago
Audio software, Video software, Graphics software, plus pretty decent UX.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

joshchaney 6y ago

There's two articles [1] now on the front page of HN from this bit-101.com domain and they both seem pretty basic for HN. The other one is just about some guy installing a third party CPU cooler. No new tech, nothing interesting about the cooler, he just found it works better than the stock one. This article walks through using a shell script he found on GitHub to virtualize MacOS and his install and his very unscientific opinions on performance. Where's the beef? 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24599832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24599832

chmaynard 6y ago
From the HN Guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." Oh, and I think you meant "There are two articles".
chmod775 6y ago
> pretty basic for HN HN is not a homogeneous mass anymore and not everyone has experience with everything already. > Where's the beef? The usefulness of this article probably depends on what you take away from it. That you can viably run OSX in a VM was certainly news to me.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bit-101 6y ago
Yeah, I'm the author of those articles. Sorry they are not beefy enough for you, but I'm not the one submitting them here. In fact, HN is not a site I usually visit at all. This is just my personal blog where I post stuff that I find interesting.

TooCleverByHalf 6y ago

> I’ve been considering building a “Hackintosh” system. But with Apple’s plans of going to ARM possibly by the end of this year, I don’t want to invest a lot in hardware that’s going to be obsolete soon. This argument doesn't make much sense to me. While not all hardware works with the goal of building a hackintosh. Plenty of top of the line hardware does and will run Windows just fine if ARM becomes an issue.

aloknnikhil 6y ago
You generally build a hackintosh machine with parts that are most compatible with MacOS and not necessarily the best bang for buck. So, I agree with the argument from the article here. If ARM makes the build obsolete, then all you now have is a Windows machine that you did not spend your money wisely on.
- hellisothers 6y ago
  Have you built a Hackintosh? I have, the only two parts that require any consideration are the Motherboard and the GPU, and even then enough Motherboards are fine as to say really the only consideration is the GPU. I admit you pretty much have to use a stock AMD GPU, if you’re ok with essentially this one requirement then you’re set, if not then yea you didn’t spend your money wisely.
  - kitsunesoba 6y ago
    A lot of AIB cards work too, for example the Sapphire 5700XT Nitro+ is popular for hackintoshing. There are a handful that don't (usually because the GPU vendor decided to make some funky design change), both those surface pretty quickly after the release of a new model and are easy to avoid.
  - aloknnikhil 6y ago
    Well, I did build a hackintosh and the parts you claim need to be fixed are exactly the parts I claim are not spent wisely on. You're paying for compatibility not performance. I mean the AMD offerings are no where near Nvidia, particularly with the release of the 3000 series. But you have to settle with AMD for compatibility.

sumanthvepa 6y ago

Running macOS in a VM that is not running on a Mac is a violation of your contract with Apple. However, there are no restrictions on running a macOS VM on a mac. This can be very useful if you are a developer who needs to test on older macOS versions. I use VirtualBox running on a Mac, although I believe KVM/QEMU also works on a mac. (on Intel Macs -- this won't work in the future with Apple Silicon) for testing on older macOS versions. As usual with advice on the internet: caveat lector. I'm not a lawyer.

varbhat 6y ago

https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago

In 2006 or 7 I played around with OS X Tiger in a VM from Windows and it was like a portal into a much more advanced operating system. It was the beginning of me moving entirely to OS X over time. At the time, almost everyone was on XP and Tiger was very impressive. Looking back, most of the advantages of Tiger were audiovisual in nature. But the vastly better command line was also a big deal.

divbzero 6y ago

GitHub Actions provide another option for testing against macOS: See action-tmate [1] and fastmac [2] for reference, as well as previous discussion on HN [3]. [1]: https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate [2]: https://github.com/fastai/fastmac https://github.com/fastai/fastmac [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24452384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24452384

in_ab 6y ago

I have used this set up in the past. With GPU, NVMe and USB passthrough it feels pretty much native. There are definitely some caveats. You can't just passthrough any GPU. Post High Sierra AMD has the best support. Select Nvidia GPUs like the GT 710 still work, but it doesn't do hardware video decoding. I could never get sleep to work either. With Apple moving towards ARM in the future, I thought of giving Linux another shot. It's not as polished but so far has been adequate.