KVM-Opencore VS OSX-KVM

Compare KVM-Opencore vs OSX-KVM and see what are their differences.

KVM-Opencore

OpenCore disk image for running macOS VMs on Proxmox/QEMU (by thenickdude)

OSX-KVM

Run macOS on QEMU/KVM. With OpenCore + Monterey + Ventura + Sonoma support now! Only commercial (paid) support is available now to avoid spammy issues. No Mac system is required. (by kholia)
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KVM-Opencore OSX-KVM
36 263
1,141 18,343
- -
2.8 5.6
about 1 month ago 13 days ago
Makefile Python
GNU General Public License v3.0 only -
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

KVM-Opencore

Posts with mentions or reviews of KVM-Opencore. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-24.
  • Ventrua on Proxmox with GPU passthrough, Couldn't alloc class "AppleKeyStoreTest"
    1 project | /r/Proxmox | 27 May 2023
    The EFI folder is the same as v20 here
  • MacOS Ventura VM Safari not loading properly / rendering issue.
    1 project | /r/hackintosh | 17 May 2023
  • Ventura Installation: vm_shared_region_start_address() failed
    2 projects | /r/macOSVMs | 24 Mar 2023
    Build v19 from u/thenickdude
  • Suggestions for VGA mode
    2 projects | /r/qemu_kvm | 5 Feb 2023
    #!/usr/bin/env bash # Special thanks to: # https://github.com/Leoyzen/KVM-Opencore # https://github.com/thenickdude/KVM-Opencore/ # https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/docs/usb2.txt # # qemu-img create -f qcow2 mac_hdd_ng.img 128G # # echo 1 > /sys/module/kvm/parameters/ignore_msrs (this is required) ############################################################################ # NOTE: Tweak the "MY_OPTIONS" line in case you are having booting problems! ############################################################################ MY_OPTIONS="+ssse3,+sse4.2,+popcnt,+avx,+aes,+xsave,+xsaveopt,check" # This script works for Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra. Tested with # macOS 10.15.6, macOS 10.14.6, and macOS 10.13.6. ALLOCATED_RAM="7096" # MiB CPU_SOCKETS="1" CPU_CORES="8" CPU_THREADS="8" REPO_PATH="." OVMF_DIR="." # shellcheck disable=SC2054 args=( -enable-kvm -m "$ALLOCATED_RAM" -cpu Penryn,kvm=on,vendor=GenuineIntel,+invtsc,vmware-cpuid-freq=on,"$MY_OPTIONS" -machine q35 -usb -device usb-kbd -device usb-tablet -smp "$CPU_THREADS",cores="$CPU_CORES",sockets="$CPU_SOCKETS" -device usb-ehci,id=ehci # -device usb-kbd,bus=ehci.0 # -device usb-mouse,bus=ehci.0 -device nec-usb-xhci,id=xhci -global nec-usb-xhci.msi=off # -device usb-host,vendorid=0x8086,productid=0x0808 # 2 USD USB Sound Card # -device usb-host,vendorid=0x1b3f,productid=0x2008 # Another 2 USD USB Sound Card # -device vfio-pci,host=3:00.0,bus=pcie.0 -device isa-applesmc,osk="ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc" -drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly=on,file="$REPO_PATH/$OVMF_DIR/OVMF_CODE.fd" -drive if=pflash,format=raw,file="$REPO_PATH/$OVMF_DIR/OVMF_VARS-1024x768.fd" -smbios type=2 -device ich9-intel-hda -device hda-duplex -device ich9-ahci,id=sata -drive id=OpenCoreBoot,if=none,snapshot=on,format=qcow2,file="$REPO_PATH/OpenCore/OpenCore.qcow2" -device ide-hd,bus=sata.2,drive=OpenCoreBoot -device ide-hd,bus=sata.3,drive=InstallMedia -drive id=InstallMedia,if=none,file="$REPO_PATH/BaseSystem.img",format=raw -drive id=MacHDD,if=none,file="$REPO_PATH/mac_hdd_ng.img",format=qcow2 -device ide-hd,bus=sata.4,drive=MacHDD # -netdev tap,id=net0,ifname=tap0,script=no,downscript=no -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0,id=net0,mac=52:54:00:c9:18:27 -netdev user,id=net0 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0,id=net0,mac=52:54:00:c9:18:27 # -netdev user,id=net0 -device vmxnet3,netdev=net0,id=net0,mac=52:54:00:c9:18:27 # Note: Use this line for High Sierra -monitor stdio -device VGA,vgamem_mb=128 ) qemu-system-x86_64 "${args[@]}"
  • Proxmox Bootloop macos 13
    1 project | /r/macOSVMs | 29 Dec 2022
  • MacOS KVM GPU Passthrough Hangs
    4 projects | /r/VFIO | 7 Nov 2022
  • Catalina on the desktop proxmox?
    1 project | /r/Proxmox | 9 Oct 2022
    If that's my OpenCore ISO, I rechecked High Sierra recently with v18 and it boots fine.
  • Bare Metal vs Virtualization dual boot
    2 projects | /r/hackintosh | 27 Jul 2022
    The mid/hard way would be to have a powerful PC like I did recently, switch to Linux as the host, and use it as your main OS and then for specific stuff, turn on the Windows or OSX machines. The problem here is that you have to deal with Linux and its quirks... editing files with the terminal, sudo, setting up QEMU, editing the libvirt XML files (or create your own bash scripts for QEMU) and so on... It feels like a hassle sometimes, and getting OSX to work in a virtual environment is a hit or miss - there's a few projects out there that can help) but then getting them to work is like running a command and having it contained in its own "window" and you can also share files between the host and the VM almost seamlessly.
  • Windows 10 on MacOS Host?
    1 project | /r/VFIO | 21 Jul 2022
  • anyone able to boot big sur on coreboot/tianocore? i get reboots maybe because of bad dsdt in coreboot
    2 projects | /r/hackintosh | 20 Jul 2022
    What are you using to create VM? You don't need to configure these two: macOS Simple KVM OpenCore KVM

OSX-KVM

Posts with mentions or reviews of OSX-KVM. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-08.
  • VirtualBox KVM Public Release
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Feb 2024
    Yes, I recently had to compile some stuff on Windows (I'm on an AMD Linux host) and VirtualBox just wouldn't start Microsoft's Windows dev VM (the one they provide for free for Virtualbox). I ended up learning how to use qemu and it works great...and as a bonus I was able to run a hackintosh (via https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM) and it works near flawlessly, which was something I was never able to accomplish with Virtualbox (granted I haven't tried in a few years).

    I'm pretty happy with Qemu now, even if it's jsut a CLI interface. I was tempted to try the virt-* stuff, but honestly it seems like one more thing to learn so I'm going to hold off until I need something like copy/paste between VMs and can't figure it out in qemu direct.

  • NixThePlanet - Run macOS, Windows and more via a single Nix command + nixosModules
    3 projects | /r/NixOS | 9 Dec 2023
    Working on a patch to include it as a flake input instead of vendoring it in the repo, so this should no longer be true. I use the QCOW2s for OpenCore from osx-kvm that I have not figured out how to reproduce yet https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM/blob/master/OpenCore/OpenCore.qcow2
  • [PROJECT] Working on a project called ultimate-macOS-KVM!
    2 projects | /r/VFIO | 30 Sep 2023
    For almost a year, I have been coding a little project in Python intended to piggyback on the framework of kholia's OSX-KVM project, known as ultimate-macOS-KVM, or ULTMOS.
  • FreeBSD Bhyve Virtualization
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Aug 2023
    I just researched a bit, mac os x guest vm with pcie passthrough seems possible on linux.

    Dropping the links below:

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

    https://github.com/yoonsikp/macOS-KVM-PCI-Passthrough

  • VirGL
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Aug 2023
    VirGL is definitely an interesting project, but all one has to do to get GPU passthrough working (from a Linux QEMU host to any guest OS) is: 1.) research a cheap, secondary GPU that is natively supported by the guest OS, 2.) plug such a secondary GPU into a PCIe slot on the host and hook it up to the primary monitor with a secondary cable (D-Sub vs. DVI, etc.), 3.) setup Linux to ignore the secondary GPU at boot and configure a QEMU VM for the GPU passthrough. The whole process takes perhaps one or two hours and as works flawlessly, with no stability issues. (Switching across the two GPU cables can be accomplished in software by using Display Data Channel /DDC/ utilities and switching keyboard/mouse can be accomplished by using evdev /event device/ passthrough.) More information: https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM/blob/master/notes.md#gpu-p...
  • Mac OS Kvm Icloud
    1 project | /r/hackintosh | 9 Aug 2023
    I get "verification failed" error when using https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
  • What are the current best methods for virtualizing MacOS on Linux?
    2 projects | /r/linux | 21 Jul 2023
    I also see there is KVM-OSX which looks to be actively maintained, but I haven't heard anything about it.
  • Lima: A nice way to run Linux VMs on Mac
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Jul 2023
    You can use qemu/libvirt/kvm on any Linux host to run macOS pretty easily these days[1]. I run Ventura on unraid with nvidea gpu passthrough and it’s been fairly painless.

    You can also run macOS in docker, but it’s ultimately running through qemu/kvm as well[2]

    1. https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

    2. https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX

  • Gnome browser instead of Safari
    1 project | /r/gnome | 24 Jun 2023
    I think this could be of some use to you https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
  • I achieved to run a macOS VM on the Steam Deck in SteamOS desktop mode
    1 project | /r/SteamDeck | 8 Jun 2023
    i cloned that repository

What are some alternatives?

When comparing KVM-Opencore and OSX-KVM you can also consider the following projects:

macOS-Simple-KVM - Tools to set up a quick macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM.

AMD_Vanilla - Native AMD macOS via OpenCore

sosumi-snap

OSX-KVM - Personal fork for testing

OpenCore-Install-Guide - Repo for the OpenCore Install Guide

vendor-reset - Linux kernel vendor specific hardware reset module for sequences that are too complex/complicated to land in pci_quirks.c

macOS-KVM - Streamlined macOS QEMU KVM Hackintosh configuration using OpenCore and libvirt

OSX_GVT-D - Guide to pass iGPU to MacOS KVM guest.

OpenCorePkg - OpenCore bootloader

Single-GPU-Passthrough