macos-virtualization

MacOS virtualization - mainly links

Working VirtualBox / Packer scripts!! (2016.12)

• https://github.com/timsutton/osx-vm-templates
• related tutorial: https://spin.atomicobject.com/2015/11/17/vagrant-osx/
• and our related tool, based on these articles & repos: https://github.com/bitrise-tools/replica

KVM / QEMU

• My own KVM + QEMU experiment can be found (with links!) in the own-kvm-qemu-experiment directory
• Running Mac OS X El Capitan and macOS Sierra on QEMU/KVM: https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
  • Related discussion with even more links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12556609

vagrant / VirtualBox

Own experiment

Some notes for experimenting with VirtualBox based OS X VMs:

• how to install OS X guest in VirtualBox running on OS X: http://engineering.bittorrent.com/2014/07/16/how-to-guide-for-mavericks-vm-on-mavericks/
  • detailed step-by-step guide, with images, from step 0 (downloading OS X installer from the App Store) to up-and-running
  • NOTES:
    • the new Haswell based Intel CPUs are still not yet properly supported and require a (quick) workaround - detailed in the article.
    • to tweak the CPU performance you could try other CPU IDs:
      • VBoxManage modifyvm <vmname> --cpuidset 1 000206a7 02100800 1fbae3bf bfebfbff source
    • our best configuration so far (set it before starting the VM!)
      • 2 CPU, execution cap 100%
      • 4096 MB RAM
      • Chipset: PIIX3
      • 128MB VRAM (video ram)
      • enable all the acceleration features (except 2D acceleration)
      • if required: VBoxManage modifyvm <vmname> --cpuidset 1 000206a7 02100800 1fbae3bf bfebfbff
• to be able to SSH into the VM through the default NAT network adapter (which is required for vagrant) you have to set up a port forwarding with: host 127.0.0.1 port 2222 -> guest 22
  • vagrant does this automatically but if you want to test the SSH login of the box before packaging it you'll have to do it yourself
• Start the VM
• Install OS X
  • In general for vagrant to be able to work with the VM you just have to:
    • create a user with username vagrant and password vagrant
    • enable "remote login" (SSH) in MacOS
    • preferably add the "vagrant insecure SSH key" to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
    • also preferably enable passwordless sudo for the vagrant user, at the end of sudo visudo add: vagrant ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL