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besson3c · Apr 30, 2010, 08:58 PM

Slashdot Apple Story | VirtualBox Beta Supports OS X As Guest OS On Macs

Very interesting... I'm a big fan of Virtualbox. In fact, there are sites that have benchmarked it faster than VMWare (although these tests weren't conducted under OS X).

I hope that this isn't squashed by Apple, it would be great to virtualize versions of OS X!

besson3c · May 1, 2010, 03:01 AM

No interest in this? I thought this was a pretty big deal. I'm sure VMWare and Parallels will follow with OS X virtualization if Apple doesn't kill this.

seanc · May 1, 2010, 06:26 AM

Ooooh.

Now if I could get support for that on a PC!

lpkmckenna · May 1, 2010, 11:35 AM

I think this is great, but not terribly useful for me personally.

Atheist · May 1, 2010, 11:57 AM

Intriguing yes… but not useful for me either.

besson3c · May 23, 2010, 05:49 PM

Virtualbox 3.2 is out, and it looks like the OS X support has the following limitations:

Mac OS X hosts. The following restrictions apply (all of which will be resolved in future versions):

The numlock emulation has not yet been implemented.

The CPU frequency metric is not supported.

3D OpenGL acceleration, in particular with Linux guests that have 3D effects enabled (such as with compiz-enabled window managers).

Memory ballooning is not supported.

Mac OS X Server guests.

Mac OS X Server guests can only run on a certain host hardware. For details about license and host hardware limitations, please see the section called “Mac OS X Server guests”.

VirtualBox does not provide Guest Additions for Mac OS X Server at this time.

The graphics resolution currently defaults to 1024x768 as Mac OS X Server falls back to the built-in EFI display support. See the section called “Video modes in EFI” for more information on how to change EFI video modes.

Even when idle, Mac OS X Server guests currently burn 100% CPU. This is a power management issue that will be addressed in a future release.

Mac OS X Server guests only work with one CPU assigned to the VM. Support for SMP will be provided in a future release.

Depending on your system and version of Mac OS X Server, you might experience guest hangs after some time. This can be fixed by turning off energy saving (set timeout to "Never") in the system preferences.

By default, the VirtualBox EFI enables debug output of the Mac OS X Server kernel to help you diagnose boot problems. Note that there is a lot of output and not all errors are fatal (they would also show on your physical Mac). You can turn off these messages by issuing this command:

VBoxManage setextradata vmname "VBoxInternal2/EfiBootArgs" " "
To revert to the previous behavior, use:

VBoxManage setextradata vmname "VBoxInternal2/EfiBootArgs" ""

It looks like you can run both Client and Server, but there are these limitations... I'm assuming many/all of these same Server limitations apply to Client too (no power management, resolution, etc.

Memory ballooning is a feature that has been added to Virtualbox 3.2. It is off by default, so this shouldn't be a deal breaker.

Cold Warrior · May 23, 2010, 06:19 PM

I followed the instructions on cnet-macfixit and got it working without issues. It could be my hardware, but it was slow, so I don't plan on using the os x guest.

Virtualizing Mac OS X Server with Virtual Box | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews

MBP C2D 13" unibody, 9400M, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD.

besson3c · May 23, 2010, 10:28 PM

Cold Warrior: well, it's a little confusing an inconsistent as to whether cores = CPUs in VM host terminology, but I suspect that for the most part, they do. This means that you can only use one core with virtualizing OS X, which would account in part for the poor performance.