Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlgaddis | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off-topic: Does anyone run Mac OS X under VirtualBox on Linux (or tried to)?

I have a 2011 MacBook Pro (8 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA, 15") that I used almost exclusively (and occasionally used a Windows 7 VM on) until this past May when I bought a beefed up Thinkpad W530 (32 GB RAM, 480 GB SSD + 500 GB SATA, 1920x1080) and installed Linux on it

I've barely touched the MBP since then and only occasionally miss it, but I did notice that OS X is apparently supported on recent versions of VirtualBox. Like the Windows 7 VM that I keep around, it might be useful to have an OS X VM that I can fire up if the need arises.

View on HN

No experience with VirtualBox, but I use OS X in ESXI and VMware Fusion and both of those work for me. Initial installation of OS X can be a challenge - you may need to disable some virtualization features e.g. interrupt remapping and you can have some driver challenges depending on your specific hardware (e.g. recent mac mini needs a network driver).

Officially, VMware only supports mac pro (1). Unofficially, minis also work. Haven't tried a macbook pro.

1: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?dev...

Thanks, I appreciate the reply. It's looking like I won't bother actually attempting this, though. If it were real easy I might do it but from all of the replies it sounds like way more trouble than I want to deal with.

> I did notice that OS X is apparently supported on recent versions of VirtualBox

Indeed. I've used VirtualBox to prime OS X images on attached USB storage to run on stock X86 hardware. Just remember to use EFI boot and you should be OK.

As long as you are running virtual, graphics support is limited to 1024x768 geometry though (even in fullscreen) and I can't say I've found any working ways around that.

That said, Linux does everything I need these days, and I no longer see any point in putting down effort to run a OS which Apple clears doesn't want me to run.

I haven't done it with VirtualBox, but I have with VMWare - it is monstrously slow, until you install VMSVGA2[1], then it's pretty gravy. It's not as quick as native but it's massively improved.

Some applications render better than others; I see a nearly order-of-magnitude better framerate in Safari vs Chrome, which is too bad, but all in all it's usable and I do some development in it with few issues.

1. http://sourceforge.net/projects/vmsvga2/

To rescue an old iMovie project of mine, I used 10.6 (or whatever version last had Rosetta) in Virtualbox 4.something. From memory I needed a completely hacked version of OS X and I wouldn't have had a chance of getting it working from my retail disc (yes, I own one!)

Given the option again, I'd rent a machine or borrow one.

Heh, I'll keep the MacBook Pro around then. I don't foresee the need to ever fire up an OS X VM other than at home.

TL;DR: use VMware player.

Yes, I ran several versions of Hackintosh VDI files on VirtualBox under Linux. It all works, but it is slooooooow (on some seriously fast hardware too). I tried many versions because of that, and used both OSS and Oracle versions of VirtualBox, but nothing helped. I finally gave up and tried using VMware player. What a difference... It runs smoothly, things "just work". I didn't have the courage to enable network connection to the world though - I have no idea what else is installed on the (pirated) OSX. But if you install it yourself (from a legal copy) you should be ok.

That sounds like more trouble than I want to deal with. If it were as effortless as running Windows in a VM I might pursue it but I don't have enough of a real need for it to bother. Thanks!

I've successfully booted OS X on VirtualBox in Windows, but it is slow. It's useful when you're completely out of options for debugging an OS X-specific bug or something, but it's basically completely worthless outside of that.

Good to know, thanks. I'll just keep the MacBook Pro close by.

I tried that with QEMU once. It sort of works but I didn't really go too far into it. I did it more to see whether it could be done or not. That's actually the only time I've used OS X by the way, so I might have missed some things that didn't work. Either way I wouldn't recommend it. The install took about 8 hours and the whole thing was rather slow. VirtualBox might do better though.

I run it under Xen with a GPU passed through using VT-d. There are dozens of guides for running it in Xen and also many guides for passing GPUs through to Xen guests. No problems to report. The OSX guest has full access to the GPU. Yet to attempt an OS upgrade though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com