Help offered (macOS VMs)

[Ken Cunningham]

I find Parallels is also very good for macOS VMs.

I have a 24-core MacPro 5,1 with 32GB RAM that I mostly use for systems I don’t have as hardware, and have VMs set up in Parallels for MacOS 10.5 through BigSur. I usually give a dozen cores and 16GB of RAM to the VM when I’m working with it, but it runs with much less. They can be run headless in the background as well.

For emulating Tiger i386 I use VirtualBox. I give it 3GB of RAM and one core. In the past, with VirtualBox 5.x, I could use two cores, but with VB 6.x there is some regression and now Tiger will only run with one core otherwise kernel panic. Still, quick for Tiger, with a current fast processor. I also have Tiger i386 on hardware.

I have qemu installations of 10.4 PPC and 10.5 PPC, but they are just awfully slow; they can only use 1 emulated processor. If they could multicore up to 4 processors I might consider them usable, but that doesn’t work last time I tried it a year or so ago. For PPC work I just use one of my G5s; they are pretty quick and usably fast.


> On Sep 22, 2021, at 12:18 PM, Blake Garner <blake at netjibbing.com> wrote:
> 
> Is there a reason macports would not use VMware Fusion for x86 versions? It has the best macOS support and I'm sure that macports could get some licenses as needed for free. For PPC I have had good luck with qemu in the past. 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 7, 2021 at 1:41 AM Ruben Di Battista <rubendibattista at gmail.com <mailto:rubendibattista at gmail.com>> wrote:
> I'm also very slowly working on this (the `slowly` is PhD related) and I was targeting KVM. I'll probably give a try also to Hyper-V since I started using Windows 11 with WSL for development. 
> 
> You can probably search in the list posts from me where we discussed this a bit in details. 
> 
> On Tue, 7 Sep 2021, 10:09 Bjarne D Mathiesen, <macintosh at mathiesen.info <mailto:macintosh at mathiesen.info>> wrote:
> Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> > 5.) We're looking for someone willing to play around with macOS VMs,
> > in particular the older ones: 10.6 (or even 10.4/10.5 for utter geeks)
> > and newer. We currently run CI jobs just on what GitHub provides (2 or
> > 3 latest OSes), but it would be nice to set up disposable VMs where we
> > could fire up a VM, build the ports from CI, and destroy the VM.
> 
> What hypervisor it the target ?
> 
> I have tried to get a 10.6.8 to work in VirtualBox; but
> 1) it kept crashing
> 2) I couldn't get it to up the RAM above 2GB
>    even though some mac systems ran 10.6 up to at least 8GB
> 
> -- 
> Bjarne D Mathiesen
> Korsør ; Danmark ; Europa
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> denne besked er skrevet i et totalt M$-frit miljø
> MacPro 2010 ; OpenCore + macOS 10.15.7 Catalina
> 2 x 3,46 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon ; 256 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC RDIMM
> ATI Radeon RX 590 8 GB

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