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Comment by wayoutthere | Hacker News Reader

It's actually not too bad to run macOS in a VM -- this is an option Apple doesn't explicitly support, but they also realize how useful it can be for automated testing of apps and browser compatibility. The company line is that they only support macOS on a VM on a "legitimate" Mac, but realistically it's not hard to find guides on how to virtualize it on a Windows host.

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With the ever notable exception that graphics acceleration straight up does not exist at all in macOS in a VM. The only way to get it is to use virtIO on a Linux box to pass through a secondary AMD card, I believe.

That seems to be the case.

Note that you'd have to user vt-d, in combination with vfio, not virtio. Vt-d allows for PCIe passthrough. VirtIO is a family of paravirtualized hardware like HDD controllers and network interfaces.

Besides the name-switchup, you're completely right.

https://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Virtio

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-virtualizati...

I have a 16 core Ryzen Threadripper. Built a kvm install of Mojave, gave it 8 cores, 32GB of RAM. It wouldn't so well for someone who wanted to actually use it as a Mac, but for me as a cross-platform C++ developer, it's totally ideal. No separate keyboard, no KVM (the other KVM) switch, just boot the VM and there's a faster more powerful version of macOS waiting for my compile/edit/limited-run workflow than I could reasonably ever get from Apple.

Note: I own a couple of Mac Minis too, just for the license of course.

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