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Comment by fraserphysics | Hacker News Reader

I thought that macOS was proprietary, and that apple only allowed it to be run on apple hardware. Just last month, I used incus to test a software package in 6 Linux distributions. I want to also test the package in macOS. Must I get a license from apple to do that with Quickemu?

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Officially? You can't get a license.

Unofficially? https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

Encouraged by the replies here, I tried to get quickemu to setup macOS on my AMD based desktop. The emulated machine crashed trying to boot macOS, and I gave up after a couple of hours.

hackintoshes have been a thing forever. Apple hopes to kill them off with the transition to arm...SPOILER: they won't.

Uh, I think they will! A few people will just keep running older versions forever, but anyone who wants a modern Mac operating system is going to be out of luck once Intel support is dropped next year.

Intel-based Macs were fundamentally commodity hardware. You can buy AMD GPUs which are very close to what Apple shipped. Select the right components, add a few software patches, and everything just kind of works.

By contrast, you can't get an Apple Silicon GPU. And on ARM, macOS doesn't support software rendering at all. Graphics alone are going to kill any future Hackintosh prospects, because even if you can get Darwin to boot on your ARM laptop, you won't be able to display anything.

An an aside, Apple never seemed to try very hard to kill personal Hackintoshes, I really don't think they cared. Now it's going to happen incidentally.

The problem is that macOS ARM uses extra features that don't exist on CPUs outside of Apple Silicon. So you can run virtual macOS ARM on a macOS host (such as inside UTM), but not on anything else.

There isn't currently a real ecosystem of non-Apple ARM machines anyway.

Servers exist. Also, maybe the missing instructions can be trapped and emulated?

It’s possible. As far as I know nobody has done this yet (outside of Apple).

The virtual kernels are almost stock.

Yeah, it wouldn’t be a huge amount of work.

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