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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> It has to be running OSX because I haven't found any way to run an OSX VM on any other platform.

It is fairly easy to get decent OS X virtualization using Debian as base OS and QEMU-KVM for virtualization. You won't have niceties such as GPU acceleration but it will work.

Search for "OSX KVM" on Google, it will take you where you want - unfortunately a direct link would expose me to legal liabilities. Also, be warned that using this method may violate Apple's EULA.

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Hackintosh systems are easy as long as you're not looking to update them after everything is working correctly.

They are fragile systems that one doesn't really want to risk production environments on in my opinion.

Generally Hackintoshes are fine for CI machines, since it doesn’t really matter if Wi-Fi or the camera or iMessage works correctly, as it might matter if you were using the machine for personal use. Updates are also generally fine if you wait a bit for other people to test before installing.

As far as I know, there isn’t anything that goes against using OSX in a VM in the EULA — so long as your host runs on Mac hardware. I don’t think you even need to use OSX as the primary OS in the machine.

That’s an admittedly big caveat, but also one of the reasons why virtualizing OSX works in the first place.

Have you figured out a way to bootstrap it without a Mac? I successfully got an image running under Vbox on Fedora, but I had to build the image first on a Mac and then export it as an appliance.

Also, performance was atrocious. It was so bad as to basically make it unusable. 5 second delay before processing mouse and key events.

It's possible to create an OSX VM under KVM. It's a little clunky, you get very bad graphics performances, and you can run in really weird issues (for example, the NIC not going-up properly), but it works, and if you are using it as a CI platform and/or only sshing into it, it's more than usable.

It's really handy when you are testing/adding support for projects (like C/C++ with cmake) on OSX.

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