Friday 15 January 2021

MacOS Catalina running in QEMU on Linux

This is macOS Catalina running in QEMU on top of KDE Neon Linux. I used an easy to follow how-to at Computing For Geeks that uses the macOS-Simple-KVM project on Github. 


By default, the script sets the display resolution at a single resolution, currently 1280x720, and I haven't yet to tinker with it, It is also possible to enable PCI Express pass-through for GPUs but I am not sure how well that will work either since I am using Nvidia GT710 graphics on this machine. It's my main desktop, a HP Z400 workstation with 12GB RAM and Intel W3520 Xeon CPU, the only machine I have capable of running the macOS VM. 

MacOS seems to think it's a Late 2009 iMac 27" Core 2 Duo, since two cores are allocated to it by default. RAM and cores allocated can be changed by editing the script. I have increased the amount of RAM to 3GB. I seem to have an issue with Step 4 of the guide, adding the VM to Virt-Manager. It won't let me add the right disk image in storage so I have to start the VM from ~/macOS-Simple-KVM$ ./basic.sh every time. And Bridged Networking is a bit fiddly, so right now it can connect to the net, but not my local network. I have not thought of a particular use for this VM yet, but I am sure it might come in handy if I need a macOS-only app at some point.   




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