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Comment by 95014_refugee | Hacker News Reader

"using a custom [FreeBSD] kernel seems tricky in a VMWare/VirtualBox VM"

This flipped a set-once bit, making the rest of the article essentially unreadable due to zero confidence in the writer's technical skill. Also, the lack of "late 2011" in the title makes it pretty misleading.

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I thought the exact same thing. It's trivially simple to run custom kernels. Further, with currentish versions of OSX, you don't even need VMware/VB. The built-in hypervisor works good enough without crash prone kexts like in the alternative in my experience.

Not sure if you read the rest of the article, but it didn't do much to instill technical competence after that point either.

Not claiming to be knowledgeable about OS X internals, but... it ships with a hypervisor now?

Is it at all similar to BSD jails?

No, but there is a port of bhyve using the MacOS hypervisor.framework

https://github.com/mist64/xhyve

Or, if you want something with a GUI, there is Veertu:

https://veertu.com/

It's been there since 10.10: https://developer.apple.com/reference/hypervisor

Jails aren't a hypervisor. A jail is just a number in the process table. That's what the hipsters call "containers" these days :-)

FreeBSD's hypervisor is called bhyve (and it uses vmm.ko), and xhyve is a port of bhyve to macOS (uses Apple's Hypervisor.framework). There are other things that use Hypervisor.framework too.

> There are other things that use Hypervisor.framework too.

Docker's macOS installer uses it rather than VirtualBox now if memory serves.

Yeah, my bad, I was just short on sleep when I wrote that :P

Still nice to know about Hypervisor.framework. If I ever get back to OS X I'll have to check it out!

Couldn't you just have said, "this guy doesn't know what he's talking about", like a normal person?

That was hard to parse.

No.

This is what I think whenever anyone says "an order of magnitude" instead of "very".

and 2 sentences after describing themselves as someone "whose definition of "fun" includes spending 6 hours in the middle of the night figuring how to get dual boot working with UEFI."

So the author really enjoys debugging boot problems, but a custom kernel in a VM is just too tricky? Is there something I'm missing that makes that way harder than debugging dual boot?

Author here. Debugging dual boot is interesting, debugging virtualbox is not. And I was curious if I can get it running. I just was too lazy to figure it out, I found a more interesting problem to work on. In the end, I stayed in the native FreeBSD install, so there was no motivation to figure out the custom kernel in virtualbox (it is quite simple in bhyve, though)

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