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Comment by sparkling | Hacker News Reader

Too late. Hackintosh is up and running.

A new Mac Pro that can be upgraded by the user is great news for the Hackintosh community as well. There will be more drivers for more components.

My impossible dream is that Apple would simply release a microATX motherboard containing all of the "Mac goodness" and bundled with a license for macOS.

Or just sell a copy of the OS, and write a few drivers.

i would settle for a barebones machine with the basic CPU, onboard graphics, and like 4-8gb of ram but the ability to add in whatever cpu(s) and GPU i wanted, under $2000. Preferably around the price of the base imac.

Really hanging out for the nvidia Pascal drivers for my almost perfect pci passthrough VM system. I can run GPU accelerated Windows and Linux apps at (near) native speeds without rebooting, if Pascal drivers drop I'm off to the races with MacOS as well.

Can you go into a bit more detail? You're running Windows and Linux on Mac in a VM with graphics acc. at almost native speeds? Or on Linux running Windows, and possibly MacOS when (big IF) Nvidia releases Pascal drivers? If it's on Linux running Windows - I'm all ears.

Linux running Windows.

Recent Linux kernels and have added the ability to pass through PCI devices to QEMU guests.

I run NixOS with Windows 10, Windows 7, and Ubuntu guests. Only one guest can be run at a time. I have a second GPU with a second screen that gets passed directly to the VM. I use numactl and nice to half surrender half my CPU cores to the VM and static huge pages to hand over a chunk of memory. The VM also gets passed an entire dedicate SSD for application storage. I believe libvirt can do most of this automatically now. I pass in a seperate bluetooth controller for keyboard and mouse.

Performance wise you're missing some CPU power and RAM, but otherwise running at full speed. Applications run flawlessly, its my dream development machine. I dont game much but I get the same FPS from the vm as bare metal windows on the same machine, as CPU and RAM are not my bottle neck.

Id I had a supported GPU or the Pascal drivers dropped I could get MacOS running and it'd be a one stop shop.

The best source to get started I've found is the arch wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...

Thanks! This sounds almost exactly like something I need. Why separate keyboard and mouse though? Only difference that I would prefer is to retain the same keyboard/mouse/tablet and monitors (three of them) and to be able to easily switch between the two, preferably to have copy and paste working between the two. Alternative, I'm pursuing right now, is a KVM with synergy, but I have limited deskside space (for machines) - I'd rather have one machine with 20 cores and four graphics cards than two machines.

To get the performance benefits the VM can't be run with a spice / vnc interface, so there is no virtual screen or virtual input. You have to pass the VM its GPU and some USB ports and can only see/interact through those and the network bridge.

My keyboard and mouse can pair to multiple different machines at the same time and switch with a button press so I just do that.

Synergy also works fine, you just need to temporarily pass a real keyboard in to set it up.

There is also a newish feature in QEMU that allows they physical devices to be swapped back and forward by pressing both CTRL keys [1]. It works reasonably well with a few quirks (Extra mouse buttons dont work in guest, for example)

Same thing apples to the screen, I surrender an entire monitor to whatever VM is running, but you could use a KVM switch.

It's a little work to get set up and tuned but it is 100% a dual boot killer. The next time I reconfigure this machine, I won't be installing a native Windows partition, I simply don't need it anymore.

Heres a video demoing and explaining it a bit: https://youtu.be/16dbAUrtMX4

[1] https://www.kraxel.org/blog/2016/04/linux-evdev-input-suppor...

And if you're a pro user you'll need to upgrade in 1-3 years anyways so...?

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