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Comment by elmigranto | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering whether it would be easier to run macOS in VM. No more fear of updates with snapshots, and I imagine ease of installation and less compatibility issues.

Anyone does it, how's performance and keyboard "tunneling" (CMD vs CTRL)?

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MacOSX performance inside a VM is terrible, no matter your hardware.

How about VFIO using Qemu/KVM? That is the setup I have.

Nonsense, depends on the VM.

I'm curious, why do you say so?

New filesystem APFS supports snapshots, so you can use them without VM, I guess. It's already in production on iOS and probably will be released with the next macOS version.

VFIO with proper configuration and compatible hardware that you pass (sound card, USB hub, video card) is indistinguishable from native.

> keyboard "tunneling" (CMD vs CTRL)?

Better to use original mac keyboards, if you have them, not really a virtualization issue.

Ive found it pretty tough to get macOS up and running in a VM. Anyone know of any easy way?

I've come across this[0] doc before, but I haven't tried it yet so I can't speak to ease of setup and performance.

[0]: https://github.com/geerlingguy/macos-virtualbox-vm

If you dont mind downloading a potentially sketchy random VM image from the web, this has worked for me:

https://techsviewer.com/install-macos-sierra-virtualbox-wind...

VMWare ESXi officially supports Mac Pro hardware as a host. Guests will just work--you don't need to use any of the hackintosh bootloaders.

If you aren't running ESXi (or VMWare Workstation) on Apple hardware, you can use this to enable the functionality: https://github.com/DrDonk/unlocker

A few days ago I used this guide to install Yosemite on an AMD computer with Windows 10 as the host using Virtualbox. It works but there's no accelerated graphics so it feels like working remotely.

https://techsviewer.com/install-mac-os-x-10-10-yosemite-amd-...

The trick is to use VirtualBox 4.3 instead of 5.

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