clang memory usage vs. gcc (and OS X 10.8, 10.9, ...)

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi

On Tuesday March 18 2014 08:54:04 James Linder wrote:
> Somewhat OT so would you mind mailing me directly (unless of interest here)

I think it is (for any developer ...)

> So … what did you do and how?

I don't have the exact URLs at hand, but there is a description out there on how to get VMWare or Parallels to accept SL non-server. Basically, there has to be a file identifying the system as SL Server. The file can be removed after booting, and a pre-shutdown script puts it back. Or something like that. Removing it is less important now that there are hardly ASUs left, otherwise you'd get the SL Server updates.

So what I did was
- clone my boot disk to a dmg with Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC), skipping the largest things I wanted to skip to keep the image "small".
- convert that dmg to R/W so that I could apply the hacks to turn SL into SL Server at boot
- convert that new dmg to a VM image using VirtualBox's VBoxManage tool. I think I went with a .vdi
- It is likely that I first created a guest in VirtualBox. But since it has no OS X guest additions, I got a copy of Parallels (VMWare requires 10.7+) and imported the VM in there.

That was about all. Takes some time and you need quite a bit of disk space to jungle with, but it worked out fine. The only quirk is that my guest sees 4GB of RAM instead of the 2.5GB I gave it, but maybe that's because the host runs 10.6.8 ...

Getting 10.9 into that VM was easy. I cloned my boot disk to an external, and updated that disk to 10.9. Once that was more or less settled (10.9.1 started making a local TimeMachine copy without asking or giving feedback, which of course took ages), I started the 10.6 VM. Parallels has this nice feature that it can mount external devices to the guest when you connect them, so I got my 10.9 boot disk on the VM's desktop. I'd given it a new harddisk before, so all I had to do was start CCC and clone the external 10.9 disk onto the new VM image, and then set to boot the guest off that. A bit surprisingly that just worked -- and I can even clone the VM back onto the external.

And that gives us a very easy way to prepare OS X VM images ...

I get that "Don't Steal OS X" kext or whatever it is when I boot the VM, but I consider that I own enough SL licenses to run 2 copies on Apple hardware to be fine legally ... and 10.9 can be run in a VM without the Server version hack.

Before I forget: Paragon Software have a tool for making VM images off an existing set-up. I haven't tried it yet, though.