Mac OS Adds Early Support for VirtIO, QEMU | Hacker News Reader

Mac OS Adds Early Support for VirtIO, QEMU

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58 pointswalterbell17 comments

It's properly spelled/stylized macOS. Am I anal about this?

I have the feeling that Apple made a mistake with the name; it's so often that I see it misspelled or oddly stylized.

The mistake was having a previous product called "Mac OS" (OS 9.x and lower) then calling the new one "macOS", which is too similar. I still call it OS X.

Yeah, but what's funny is that these aren't just old timers that do the misspelling. The OS X moniker was perhaps coolest of all. But I have to admit that I pronounced it as "Oh Ess Ex", until someone explained the X was a Roman numeral and pronounced "Oh Ess Ten".

Basically everyone I know calls it is "Oh Ess Ex". We know it's 10. We just don't like it!

It's Apple's fault for writing things like: "OS X 10.9". If the X is a 10 then it should be "OS X.9", the fact that both the X and the 10 are there proves that the X is pronounced "eks" :)

While I sympathize with the prescriptivist impulse, I can't help but feel that your conscientiousness is misspent on protecting the branding of one of the world's richest corporations.

Sometimes I reminisce about the good old times when I had colleagues saying "X Windows". I could then educate them and offer them the choice of either "X" or "the X window system".

This is great news. It seems like Apple is still working to make Mac OS a great server platform, which makes sense with the upcoming introduction of the new Mac Pro.

I'd be more inclined to think that they don't want to lose developers to Microsoft after they've announced WSL2 to make stuff like Docker work better.

Docker for Mac and virtualization in general are not something to be proud of in terms of performance.

I used to think so too. Hi use Parallels to run Windows 10 to use Visio 2019. I ran the Parallels hypervisor (the default when you install Parallels) and got the performance I was expecting. After trying a few different things I then went against the advice I read online and sweated the Apple hypervisor. Haven’t looked back since. Performance has been smooth, rock solid, and with barely any fan whirring (which was much more common before).

I’m pretty sure the more recent builds of Docker for Mac can or do use the Apple hypervisor(which appeared in MacOS 10.10). If you haven’t tried it in a while, I’d give it another go.

This change won’t fix that performance as Qemu is slower than native virtualisation. This will speed up ARM emulation. Great for iPhone Simulator, and a potential future ARM Mac.

Qemu supports severel different kinds of emulation, eg on linux it can use KVM for fast virtualization. No clue what apple plans on using though

Maybe they're going to add a better ARM emulator to MacOS, or otherwise enable cross-platforn or backwards compatibility.

Or an x86 emulator for the much-rumored ARM Macs

Would it be possible to build an end user system that completely sandboxes applications with these components? ie Is it possible Apple is doing more than server side stuff here?

This already exists. It's called QubesOS[1] and it uses Xen to isolate different application domains.

[1] https://www.qubes-os.org/

MacOS as a guest is tricky. GUI is pretty much unusable without a GPU attached, and it's considered a potential vulnerability by Qubes maintainers.

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