Buildbot is offline

[Oleksiy Akimov]

Good point, but Apple Apple's Software License Agreement (EULA) explicitly permits virtualizing macOS on Apple-branded hardware but strictly caps it to two additional virtual instances per Mac. These virtual machines must run on physical Apple hardware that you own or control (which includes bare metal hosting), and the underlying host must also run macOS. Only 10.5 and 10.6 restricted running virtualization of MacOS on anything but MacOS X Server.

Apple forbids to run MacOS on hardware not manufactured by Apple.

Emulation of PowerPC may be slow, but emulation of Intel MacOS can be really sufficiently fast when/if Rosetta is used.

From: Jason Liu <jasonliu at umich.edu>
Date: Monday, 17. August 2026 at 03:19
To: Oleksiy Akimov <o.akimov at akimov-inc.com>
Cc: Mark E Anderson <mark at macports.org>; MacPorts Developers <macports-dev at lists.macports.org>
Subject: Re: Buildbot is offline

True, but emulation is slow unless you throw a lot of resources at it. Also, I could be remembering incorrectly, but virtualizing macOS by emulating the architecture might possibly violate the macOS EULA, at least for some of the older versions of Mac OS X.

On the other hand, if you're planning to violate the EULA anyway, why not just get some Intel hardware from Dell, HP, etc. and simply spin up an Intel macOS through QEMU/KVM there? You wouldn't need to emulate the architecture then.

I'm not advocating violating the EULA. Since the very beginnings of MacPorts/DarwinPorts, our community has always tried to "play nice" with Apple and adhere to the EULA.

--
Jason Liu


On Sun, Aug 16, 2026 at 7:20 PM Oleksiy Akimov <o.akimov at akimov-inc.com<mailto:o.akimov at akimov-inc.com>> wrote:
PowerPC and Intel are not so difficult to emulate via qemu on Apple Silicon.
You can even emulate MacOS 9 if needed.
https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/01/13/install-powerpc-macos-osx-on-apple-silicon-m1-and-x86-intel.html


From: macports-dev <macports-dev-bounces at lists.macports.org<mailto:macports-dev-bounces at lists.macports.org>> on behalf of Mark E Anderson <mark at macports.org<mailto:mark at macports.org>>
Date: Sunday, 16. August 2026 at 19:35
To: MacPorts Developers <macports-dev at lists.macports.org<mailto:macports-dev at lists.macports.org>>
Subject: Re: Buildbot is offline

I mean something like that could work for the latest stuff, but the buildbot goes all the way back to 10.5? (I'm not sure) Very far back in time. I've been trolling eBay for old stuff to maybe set up a mirror, but that's a long term project. Although G5 XServes are not that bad in price.

—Mark
Macports Wiki Page<https://trac.macports.org/wiki/mark> | GitHub<https://github.com/markemer> | Blog<https://emer.net>


On Sun, Aug 16, 2026, at 5:55 AM, Oleksiy Akimov wrote:
Not sure how buildbot is hosted currently - it may be an idea moving to something stateless like https://cirrus-runners.app/
Much cheaper than GitHub actions and similar alternatives.
And then making build artifacts available on something like AWS S3, so there is no reliance on a single server.

p.s. if the idea is stupid for reasons I am not aware of, please forgive me - I will mind my own business.


From: macports-dev <macports-dev-bounces at lists.macports.org<mailto:macports-dev-bounces at lists.macports.org>> on behalf of Ryan Carsten Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org<mailto:ryandesign at macports.org>>
Date: Sunday, 16. August 2026 at 02:34
To: MacPorts Developers <macports-dev at lists.macports.org<mailto:macports-dev at lists.macports.org>>
Subject: Re: Buildbot is offline
On Aug 12, 2026, at 02:45, Ryan Carsten Schmidt wrote:
>
> Buildbot is having problems. Buildmaster was sluggish and having some kind of trouble writing files. The index for the git clone of macports-ports used by the mirror job is corrupt (empty) as is its PortIndex. The SQLite database of pending builds is corrupt too. I can't fix this at the moment so it's offline for now.

Update:

While booted to the main startup volume, Disk Utility's disk check found many problems on the startup disk and although it exited with a successful message, it didn't fix any of them. I didn't check the separate RAID volume yet.

Yesterday, when booting to a macOS Install image, Disk Utility was hanging on launch so I couldn't try to repair the disk there.

Trying again today, Disk Utility is opening properly from the macOS Install image and I'm checking the disks now.



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