Hacker News Reader

Comment by hultner | Hacker News Reader

This is something I've considered for some time now. I have a beefy skylake Xeon with plenty of ECC-ram and VT-d, I'm considering letting it replace my Mac Pro at home using a VT-d passthrough for GPU. Basically I prefer macOS as my desktop OS but running KVM in the bottom or similar hypervisor would be so neat (I'd prefer illumos but that feels like a nogo for these usecases).

Do you know how a GTX780 would behave in macOS with VT-d, one was gifted to me from a friend and colleuge and if it's usable for this I'd like to use it (I have no real need for a beefy GPU as long as I can run a couple of high resolution monitors). If not which is the cheapest (and least powerconsuming) GPU you'd recommend?

Haven't been in the Hackintosh scene for a good 8 years so things seems to have changed quite a bit since then.

View on HN

I know my 750ti worked without needing drivers in macOS, but I think it needed some fiddling with clover. 780 might not work out of box, but I think it will work the web nvidia drivers.

Oh I see. Would you recommend against using a KVM+VT-d macOS install as primary desktop/workstation?

I'd probably put passthrough on USB and use a USB-dac for audio and add some decent bluetooth hardware for handoff, keyboard, mouse/touchpad, etc. I'd really like to have zvols underneat passed to the macOS-machine, I suppose I would have to use a HFS-sparseimage or similar for primary OS disk, but it would be nice to mount the zvols directly via OpenZFS for additional partitions. I would love to leverage LZ4 for document storage etc.

I can confirm that the GTX780 works. You will need to install the nvidia web drivers after macOS installation. Tried even using it with tensorflow.

Regarding your first question: I have tried virtualized and bare metal macOS (hackintosh) and I would recommend not virtualizing it if it's gonna be your primary workstation. Currently my main workstation is a hackintosh after trying first using it in a VM.

Virtualizing works, but under a VM there are several minor annoyances here and there that might drive you crazy (most of them are UI related, some app crashes, etc.). It would be perfect for example for a xcode build server. thought. YMMV!

You could virtualize it and use it as your main. I have not noticed any issues compared to a bare metal install, at least on High Sierra.

With GPU pass through, pretty much performs the same too... I've maybe seen a 5% performance hit at most after running some benchmarks. I also passed through an NVMe drive directly to the VM which avoids having to use an emulated storage controller.

I were considering that as well but it would be very nice to run the entire system from a ZVOL for snapshots, LZ4, dataintegrity, etc. Considering maybe using a passthrough block-device only for os and use attached ZVOLs for userdata. Would be cool to be able to z-send user data to a remote backup as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com