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Comment by LASR | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting from a product angle. Apple has historically not supported running macOS on VMs very well.

A few years back I built the vm infrastructure for a CI/CD platform for iOS and macOS app developers. It wasn’t easy to do this in a technically and legally well supported manner.

Why is Apple supporting this use case?

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i mean it’s been pretty easy to run macos vm’s on macos hardware for ages either with ESXi or with parallels

I mean, screw that; it's been possible to make Mac VMs on arbitrary hardware for decades with commercial software, and QEMU has been capable of it for a number of years now. That's before we even get into Hackintosh, too. Pretty much the only issue is iCloud support, which can be spoofed with a little bit of plist editing.

> Pretty much the only issue is iCloud support, which can be spoofed with a little bit of plist editing.

Interesting -- any more documentation around this to take a look at?

Sure: https://victorgamer0720yt.gitbook.io/hackintosh-imessage-fix...

It's a bit of a hassle, but I got mine to work in less than an hour. Apparently there's now mitigation that could require you to call Apple support, but I never ran into that when I was on Mojave.

I built something similar a couple of years back using Anka. I got the help of lawyers to help with some details but there were definitely cases where Apple’s non explicit stance (until recently) makes you stop and think. https://www.filip.dev/posts/veertu-interview/

Doesn't github actions support xcode builds for macOS and iOS?

There are also several macOS cloud service providers - including Amazon/AWS, which even has M1 instances.

I expect the secret that makes it easy and license-compliant is running on Apple hardware (presumably Mac mini.)

GitHub Actions has a special agreement with Apple that allows them to not have to follow the terms of the macOS EULA.

Do you have a reference for Apple granting a special macOS license to GitHub/Microsoft? Edit: apparently it's under NDA.

What about AWS, Macstadium, etc.?

As far as I am aware, they get no special exemptions, and offer Mac minis with 24-hour minimum renting terms.

Mac stadium is a large Ci/CD provider for macOS. They rack mount iMac Pro’s and Mac minis.

AWS's Mac instances aren't VMs; they are dedicated machines. I could swear I read that GitHub uses MacStadium for the Mac runners, which is also dedicated machines, but I can't find any documentation that supports that claim.

That’s not true. VMWare has worked well for years. I used on my Intel Macs for years.

It is true, and its well documented:

"The OS X EULA does allow for OS X to be virtualized on Apple hardware as both host and guest. This is why (as you note) VMware Workstation does not support OS X virtualization, but Fusion, ESXi, and vSphere do. All versions of VMware's apps check to ensure that you are running on Apple hardware and you are running a supported OS (as not all versions of OS X allow virtualization)."

I am trying to get Snow Leopard+Rosetta virtualized under Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite, as well as get Mac OS 10.8 Lion to run under Snow Leopard ( software requirements, and supporting PowerMac application, Freehand ).

Its a total complete uphill battle, that apple does not want to happen:

"You are completely correct that the EULAs are unclear about the question of running 3+ OS X VMs on a single OS X host. This is a legal question, and not a technical one. For that matter, so is the limitation about which versions of OS X can be virtualized (ex: 10.6 virtualization requires the Server edition, and all VMware applications block you from virtualizing the Standard edition)."

So, it actually is true, and there is proof in VMWare's documentation.

Shall I quote that too?

FWIW, Virtualization attempts to enforce this limit internally.

Old versions of macOS requiring the server version for use inside a VM was dumb, but there's nothing technically or legally difficult about satisfying that requirement.

Dumb or not. How do I get Rosetta to run on SLS? Snow Leopard Server? under Fusion w/ Yosemite as the hypervisor? I need to run Freehand PPC.

It works totally fine, the hardest part is finding a (legal) copy of SLS (if you care about that). I run CodeWarrior on SLS on top of Fusion on Mojave.

You’re saying that ‘traditionally’ Apple hasn’t supported this, but your examples are 10+ years old. Apple has been supporting virtualization of macOS for quite a while now, both with their own frameworks (hypervisor previously, now Virt framework) and 3rd party hypervisors.

It’s true that “once upon a time” it wasn’t supported, but those days are long past.

Traditionally Apple has supported it when it shipped hardware: Apple ][ to 68K (1991), 68k to PPC (1994), PPC to Intel(2006), and Now Intel to Mx(2020), but a few years after, its not a feature. 6 years, is 4 generations, like 100 human years. Why are the Classic and PowerPC emulators so popular? People want them.

I had someone bring in a Franklin Ace Apple II clone. There are Apple ][ emulators too. Not just for nostalgia, but for applications that are no longer supported or being developed.

I can run DOS on a Core II duo after 40 years.

My point is Apple emulation is only profitable when selling hardware, don't even think its nifty, when its dumped like old fish.

CI/CD would be my guess, lol.

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