11 ms·
Linux, macOS, and Windows running simultaneously on a first gen Core i5
- jokethrowaway 6y agoI did something similar in 2007 to cross compile a Qt application on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X Leopard. I remember being blown away by VMWare performance. It was performing pretty ok, software was not as heavy as it is today.
- nly 6y agoWhat app?
- notretarded 6y agoAnd?
- amelius 6y agoI wasn't aware that you could run macOS on Linux in a VM?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- stevewodil 6y agoLicensing aside, it's just a computer OS at the end of the day. If you can get the right hardware virtualized there should be no issues. There are premade images that make it really easy to run macOS in a VM without having to go in and change a bunch of configs
- amelius 6y agoInteresting, but it leaves the question how do you trust these images if they are not official?
- johnsoft 6y agoThere's a script linked in the post that downloads the installer directly from apple.com. Of course then you have to go through the install process yourself. https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM
- amelius 6y agoDo you know if the software "phones home", or requires an Apple ID? Can you use this as a development environment, or would you need an Apple ID?
- luke2m 6y agoIt does not require an Apple ID , it is impossible to use one without some further configuration. [1] You can’t use the App Store without an Apple ID, so you are unable to download Xcode I think. macOS is closed source, so we don’t really know hoe much it phones home. 1. https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM/blob/master/docs/guide-Apple-ID.md https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM/blob/master/docs/...
- luke2m 6y agoI read the scripts myself and they seemed OK. The images were downloaded directly from Apple
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AshamedCaptain 6y agoWhat is so strange about this? Bazillions of cloud providers are doing it on even older hardware... and OSX/macOS limitations are due to license, not technical reasons...
- luke2m 6y agoNothing strange, just wanted to share something I did and thought was cool.
- olyjohn 6y agoI thought it was cool too. Thanks for sharing.
- mbernstein 6y agoThanks for sharing. I love seeing projects people embarked on for nothing more than they thought it'd be fun to do.
- illegalsmile 6y agosadjester by any chance?
- shawnz 6y agoSometimes it's nice to just admire the technologies we already have.
- tomcam 6y agoDid the parent say anything about strange?
- rbut 6y agoI do something similar with VMWare Workstation on linux (which is free). I use the hardware IDs from my Mac Mini, that funnily enough is a Windows server, so that I can use it for iMessage. No better setup having Ubuntu as the dev OS and the ability to test on MacOS and Windows at the same time.
- luke2m 6y agoNice!
- dandongus 6y agoWhy post this here? You made 2 VMs, cool I guess?
- luke2m 6y agoWhy not? HN is for “Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups” And why make an account just to say this?
- solarkraft 6y agoMy account is a bit older and I was going to say a similar thing ("Why is this upvoted so much", of course you're free to post anything you find interesting). I really wonder what's interesting about this, maybe besides the hint that there are VM solutions for macOS. That's not in the slightest intended to be a personal attack. But HN is weird, I suppose.
- someperson 6y agoI know the news guidelines [1] say "Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills", but I do feel like the quality of the Hacker News comment section has fallen quite a lot in recent months. I'm not sure why the comment quality seems to be dropping. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- luke2m 6y agoI’ve been reading HN for a while, and just recently made an account. This is my first submission of my own. I was shocked as well (I thought it might get 2 votes). It isn’t something you hear about every day, though, virtualizing macOS, even if it isn’t too difficult.
- jdshaffer 6y agoI'm glad you shared it. I found it interesting and somewhat inspiring. Thank you!
- im_down_w_otp 6y agoOne of my pandemic projects that's ongoing is putting a 5x86 PC compatibility card and a "Radius Rocket" 68040 card (basically a Quadra 900 on a Nubus card) into a first-gen PowerPC Macintosh, so that I can have each running their era appropriate OSes in parallel and communicating with each other over IPX networking... to play DOOM II against one another all at the same time. I'd hoped it would be a nice little stress-release valve from startup CEOing occasionally, but you really get an appreciation for how much more flexible, interoperable, and stable modern computers are. The old hardware and software is incredibly fiddly, though to be fair PC compatibility cards and Radius Rockets are themselves magnificent hacks for the most part, so it's not all that surprising that they're fiddly. That said, while just differently stressful, it's still fun and rewarding when some piece of the pie fits in place.
- seany 6y agoHave to bust out the Bolo on that setup
- birdyrooster 6y agoI miss bolo. This dev made a spiritual successor and it didn’t take off :( https://store.steampowered.com/app/955410/Armoured_Alliance/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/955410/Armoured_Alliance/
- im_down_w_otp 6y agoI was always terrible at Bolo. Though I always had fun playing it nonetheless. If I could get my hands on a faster Radius Rocket (mine is only 25 Mhz), I wondered about getting Marathon 2 up and running.
- lostlogin 6y ago> Marathon 2 It feels like I only recently stopped hearing the rocket launcher and the alien chatter in daily life and in dreams. It was probably 20 years ago I last played it.
- 6y ago
- firecall 6y agoI bootcamped Windows 10 onto my 2017 i5 iMac the other day so I could play some games. Windows boots faster, feels faster, and benchmarked GPU and CPU considerably faster than macOS on the exact same hardware. Not ground breaking news, but I do wish Apple had worked on optimising macOS for older hardware more. They claim they do or did, but I never noticed this in the later mountain named versions. All a moot point now with Apple Silicon being the furture! :)
- atty 6y agoI do wonder if they stopped optimizing for Intel once it was clear they were going to release apple CPU based Macs. I don’t have one personally, but I’ve tested a family member’s M1 MacBook Air, and it’s the most responsive laptop I’ve ever used. My 2019 MacBook Pro, on the other hand, feels... Just fine. And GPU performance for sure is far better under bootcamp. I pretty much exclusively play games in bootcamp, even if there’s a Mac version.
- carlhjerpe 6y agoI don't think there's that many places in MacOS where they write hand optimised assembly for either architecture. Looking at rust it seems like LLVM is optimising a lot of languages (specially that apple uses). This is platform independent. The M1 is supposedly really fast, but it's not like they optimise userspace for either architecture. Booting is different on the M1, but once the kernel is alive and well it's just RISC vs CISC.
- saagarjha 6y agoOf course a number of system libraries do get platform-specific optimizations.
- carlhjerpe 6y agoSure, but those are usually written in a compiled language that LLVM will pass over anyways, generating optimised code. My point is that this all "mac is optimised for the hardware" "nonsense" is very non-techy. Sure they don't need to worry about drivers the same way, but it's still x86 or arm, people already target these so it's just about whose code and architecture is the better.
- devwastaken 6y agoAnyone have recommendations on virtualizing windows for gaming? I'd like to keep my main desktop linux. Nvidia recently whitelisted direct gpu access, but I've been given conflicting advice as to esxi, virt manager, proxmox, etc. Surely this is a solved problem by now?
- jhanschoo 6y agoYou need to have have a computer with integrated graphics / 2 graphics cards, and so can use a discrete card as a passthrough. Check out https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/
- sithadmin 6y agoYou don’t. Pass through to a VM on ProxMox works fine without integrated graphics and a single GPU. The graphics card simply drops the physical host console after the VM begins to boot, and then displays whatever the VM is outputting.
- sneak 6y agoDo you have more info about this setup?
- sithadmin 6y agoI used the method described here: https://elijahliedtke.medium.com/home-lab-guides-proxmox-6-pci-e-passthrough-with-nvidia-43ccfb9424de https://elijahliedtke.medium.com/home-lab-guides-proxmox-6-p... Similar approach: https://matthewdeporter.com/proxmox/proxmox-pci-passthrough/ https://matthewdeporter.com/proxmox/proxmox-pci-passthrough/
- jhanschoo 6y agoYou're right, you can do passthrough with a single GPU, and there are multiple ways to do that. But note a huge caveat: you can't run an X server, whereas being able to simultaneously run desktop apps in the host and VM is a huge reason many run Windows in a VM rather than dual-boot into it.
- tootoon 6y agoNice. I suppose having arch linux as base OS helped a lot (<400mb ram usage). Also, isn't cpu model/frequency irrelevent in this case?
- ssvss 6y agoAre you using PCI passthrough in your T410 for any of the VMs, or spice qxl based graphics for both. Does the Thinkpad have optimus nvidia card? I have a T520 with nvidia optimus, which I thought would be good for vfio pci passthrough based on r/vfio, because of it being mux based display, and nvidia having direct connection to external display. but for some reason couldn’t get it to work. I think it was because of uefi not being supported by the nvidia card, and bios mode having problem with vgaarb.
- luke2m 6y agoNo, it doesn’t have optimus, just the nvidia with no intel. Is the t520’s card supported by nvidia still?
- VWWHFSfQ 6y agoI thought maybe I could bootcamp Windows on my 2020 MacBook Pro to play the new Age of Empires coming out later this year. But I don't even think I'm going to bother. These MacBooks are freaking garbage. I'll just buy a $700 Dell to play the game.
- mgerullis 6y agoThen why did you bother buying that garbage in the first place?
- cgufus 6y agoDo macOS guests also work on macOS hosts in QEMU/KVM? (e.g. run 10.12 Sierra inside qemu on a 10.14 Mojave host) if True: any Link to a tutorial? What about performance? Is it enough performant to run GUI Apps? (I have tried Virtual Box but found it too slow for real work)
- read_if_gay_ 6y agomacOS doesn't do KVM.
- _joel 6y agoI'm not sure you'll get the features of Virtualbox if needing GUI but there is Hypervisor.framework[1] based upon xhyve[2]. It's what powers Docker Desktop on Mac. You can build linux images with linux kit[3] [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor [2] https://github.com/machyve/xhyve https://github.com/machyve/xhyve [3] https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit
- xodice 6y agoJust to clarify, xhyve is just bhyve ported to macOS and RUNS ON Hypervisor.framework which is not based on any other Hypervisor. Parallels for ARM, UTM (many QEMU frontends), xhyve and others are decent frontends for Hypervisor.framework on macOS.
- ladyanita22 6y agoI find your comment about the Windows performance surprising. I always had the impression that Windows 10 was lighter than recent iteartions of macOS. May it be because animations and UI effects were disabled on macOS but not on Windows?
- kazinator 6y agoI make TXR releases on an i5 machine. It simultaneusly runs two GNU/Linuxes, 32 and 64 bit, Mac OS, Solaris 10 and Windows. The Android build is done on a Google Pixel 4a phone which blows away the i5 in compiling.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago> The Android build is done on a Google Pixel 4a phone which blows away the i5 in compiling. You do the actual compile on the phone? Are you using termux or a chroot or something? Also, when you say Solaris 10 - Oracle Solaris, or an illumos? Just AMD64, or do you do SPARC builds? Is your release process written up anywhere? (I'm interested in packaging and portability, and this sounds interesting)
- kazinator 6y agoI use Termux on the phone. Solaris is x86 only, Oracle. Packaging is a tarball. The program detects its run-time "sysroot" and runs from anywhere; on Solaris I make the original prefix somewhere under /opt.
- winter_blue 6y agoThis would be a perfect way to use macOS' native PDF editing abilities (via the Preview app) on Linux.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago> This is my main computer, a Thinkpad T410 If your computer is a Thinkpad then you are violating the EULA for macOS since macOS can only legally run on Apple hardware. This article to me reads like "Hello Internet, this is my name, and I violated the terms of service of macOS".
- ripdog 6y agoAnd... what, exactly, are you expecting to happen to this person? An Apple SWAT team to break down his door and shoot his dog? I've happily violated hundreds of EULAs for all sorts of software in my time. They're worth less than toilet paper. I installed MacOS on my PC hardware for fun too.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago> They're worth less than toilet paper. Is ethical behavior worth less than toilet paper? I don't think so. > I've happily violated hundreds of EULAs for all sorts of software in my time. If stealing software is legitimate, then what else is legitimate to you? when does theft become legitimate in your opinion? (I don't care about your answer, really. Just think about that). > And... what, exactly, are you expecting to happen to this person? An Apple SWAT team to break down his door and shoot his dog? So, not being caught makes unethical stuff OK? Do you have a conscience? > I installed MacOS on my PC hardware for fun too. When you say "PC hardware"... Do you realize that every macOS device is also a personal computer too? The "mac and PC" dychotomy is absurd and purely marketing driven.
- keerk43 6y agoWho cares though?
- nly 6y agoAt this point Apple aren't going to persew it. The M1 spells the end of the hackintosh community
- slezyr 6y agoYou can also run Catalina and Big Sur on Linux with OSX-KVM[1]. It does everything for you and more up-to-date. 1: https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
- luke2m 6y agoThanks, y’all, for all the votes and comments. You made this middle schooler’s day.