Due to certain recent developments, It’s become clear to us that it’s necessary to update and improve our OSX VM guide. A lot’s changed since we wrote it, and rolling in those changes will make the process much more user friendly and accessible to newer VFIO users.

So here’s part 1 of our attempt at making this process easier and more straightforward.

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Prerequisites for a basic OSX VM

  • A CPU supporting SSE 4.2 (most modern ones do)
  • 64gb+ free space for VM image
  • working basic knowledge of linux

Prerequisites For 3D Acceleration

  • A Desktop with modern virtualization extensions and functional IOMMU
  • Spare GPU to pass to the VM
  • A linux install with a Qemu installation and configured to enable relevant platform features.
  • If you want Mojave or future versions of OS X, you must have a 700 series nvidia GPU or an AMD gpu without the reset bug. (Generally 280X and older as long as they have a UEFI VBIOS)

Disclaimers and Warnings

  • The vast majority of laptops won’t work, and using an eGPU to make them work is not covered in this guide.
  • Using software acceleration and not doing passthrough will degrade performance to some degree
  • No hackintosh project is update safe, and you will likely need to upgrade clover at points to maintain functionality.
  • We do not condone software piracy. We don’t offer support for those who obtain commercial software through illegitimate methods.

Basic Setup

First, install a few prerequisite packages. You’re going to need qemu, python, pip, click, request, git, and all the relevant dependencies. So run:

##Arch-based distros:
$ sudo pacman -S qemu python python-pip git

##Redhat distros:
$ sudo yum install qemu python python-pip git

##Debian-based distros:
$ sudo apt-get install qemu python python-pip git

then install click and request:

# pip install click request

From here, you’re gonna need to use git to get the macOS-Simple-KVM repo from github:

$ git clone https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM.git
$ cd macOS-Simple-KVM
$ ./jumpstart.sh

Make sure to do this in a working directory where you want the VM files to live. The jumpstart script defaults to 10.15 Catalina. If you would rather install mojave, or high sierra, just run it with the corresponding argument, e.g. ./jumpstart --high-sierra, --mojave, or --catalina

The jumpstart script should make the recovery media for your VM to install from. After it finishes, simply create a qcow2 image by running

qemu-img create -f qcow2 MyDisk.qcow2 64G

and adding these 2 lines to the included basic.sh script

    -drive id=SystemDisk,if=none,file=MyDisk.qcow2 \
    -device ide-hd,bus=sata.4,drive=SystemDisk \

where MyDisk is the name of your image.

From here you can boot your new VM by running ./basic.sh.

Basic Installation

Your vm should, after a short while, boot into clover, and then an OS X recovery partition. From here, click “Disk Utility” and format the image you created using the “Erase” button. Be sure not to format the recovery disk or the small partition labeled ESP.

After that, exit disk utility and click “reinstall OS X.”  Follow the prompts and grab a coffee. This bit can take a while.

Hopefully by now, you have a basic working OS X VM.

OSX VM

OSX VM running on my modestly spec’d Laptop

From here, there are a few common tweaks you may want to do to improve performance and useability:

Change VM Resolution

Once you’re in the VM, you can change its resolution by editing config.plist in the clover ESP.

Start by copying ESP.qcow2 and renaming the copy something like ESP.qcow2.bak. Do the same for the firmware folder.

From there, boot into the VM, open a terminal and run sudo diskutil list. The 256MB disk is the one you want. Mount its first partition by running sudo diskutil mount diskXsY (where X and Y are the disk and partition numbers)

Open finder, navigate to “EFI” in the left bar under volumes, navigate to the clover folder, and open config.plist. There should be a section of this file that looks like this

<key>ScreenResolution</key>
<string>1280x720</string>

Change this value to your desired resolution, e.g. 1920×1080. Note that some odd/intermediate resolutions like 1366×768 may not work well. Try to stick to more common 16:9, 16:10 and 4:3 form factors.

Increasing CPU/Memory

This process can increase overall performance if you have more than the default resources available to you. For memory, simply change the -m 2G \ line in basic.sh to a higher value. For CPUs, replace -smp 4,cores=2 \ with -smp cpus=X,cores=X,threads=1,sockets=1 \ where X is the number of threads you want to pass through. If you want to pass more than 8 threads, change the number of sockets to the same number of threads as well.

Switching to Virt-Manager

This will give you a GUI to launch and manage your VM with, making other adjustments and customizations easier. You’ll also need this for part 2 of the guide. Just install virt-manager and you can get started.

First things first: back up your ESP image and firmware folder as described in the resolution change section. Boot your VM, and press escape at the first UEFI dialog. Type exit, hit enter. This should bring you to the OVMF configuration menu. Navigate to Device Configuration > OVMF Platform Features, and set the resolution to the same value as your VM resolution. If you did not change your VM resolution, set it to 1280×720. Hit f10, Y, then press escape until you’re in the main dialog. hit continue and boot into the VM. Shut it down fully, then Boot again to make sure the change didn’t cause any issues.

Next, enable libvirt by running systemctl enable libvirtd.service virtlogd.service and systemctl start libvirtd.service and virtlogd.service.  Open virt-manager and make sure you see Qemu/KVM in the connections window. Double click the connection and check the value for Virsh URI. If it’s qemu:///system then run every virsh command mentioned here with sudo.

Download the generic XML we provide here. Find and replace all instances of YOURPATH with the absolute path that corresponds to your VM’s firmware and image files. After you’ve edited the xml, run virsh define OSX.xml (use sudo if your URI is qemu:///system instead of qemu:///session) in the same working directory you saved your XML to.

Restart Libvirt by running systemctl restart libvirtd.service virtlogd.service and open up virt-manager. You should have a VM named OSX under the Qemu Connection in the main window.

If you’ve already extensively customized your qemu script, you can run ./make.sh --add. This script is included in the repo.

If you get network startup errors, simply remove the NIC device in virt-manager and re-add it, manually specifying the device type to e1000-82545em.

If you get Permissions errors related to your qcow images on boot, simply remove the affected qcow images and re-add them as sata devices. Virt-manager will ask if you want it to fix the permissions. Click yes.

Troubleshooting

Qemu refuses to start after running basic.sh:

Check to make sure you have all dependencies installed. You have to manually install packages like virglrenderer and spice on some distributions. If your error includes unknown attribute type for SMBIOS, then your version of Qemu isn’t recent enough to support this project. You can try updating it by compiling a more recent version yourself or installing it through a 3rd party repo. The oldest version to support this feature is 2.8.

The Installer doesn’t have any listed hard drives:

Make sure you generated your qcow image, added it to basic.shand formatted it to hfs+ in Disk Utility before starting the installer.

Installer fails with “Failed to Contact Validation Server”

Check your internet connection and firewall settings and try again. If it still doesn’t work, make sure your system time is correct.

UI is tiny:

You can change your VM resolution to a better supported one in the ESP, like 1920×1080, or use a tool like Enable-HiDPI-OSX to regain scaling functionality.

Part 2 of this guide will cover GPU and Device Passthrough, CPU and IO optimizations, as well as other ways to improve your virtualized OSX experience.  Special thanks to Foxlet for providing most of the groundwork for this new guide.

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