vga-passthrough VS OSX-KVM

I've been using VFIO and maintaining a guide for a few years, then I've realized that VFIO kinda works, but it's not a reliable technolog, and I switched to dual boot.

There are very significant pain points, specifically:

1. if one reserves the video card for VFIO, it won't have any power management; this means that it will run hot while doing nothing; in order to work this around:

1a. first one has to battle with X, which has an option not-to-take-over-a-card-but-it-takes-it-over-nonetheless

1b. then one can give exclusive access to the graphic card driver, which then can be switched out/in when starting/stopping the VM; this unfortunately works, but not reliably

2. the points before apply to nvidia; AMD is worse, as it hasn't supported soft GPU reset until very recently (I think it was added on 5.19 or so)

2a. this means that one starts the VM, then stops it, and most of the times the card will hang

2b. there resize BAR functionality is not supported by VFIO (at least, last year it wasn't), which meant, one had to lose performance by virtualizing it

The problem is that all the points below are not in control of the user; the problems happen at driver level (if there is no reset support, one can't add it out of thin air).

Point 1 has been what lead me to abandon VFIO. It's fantastic, but finding that my card was running hot while doing nothing was really a showstopper; and the alternative of the card having a most-of-the-time-malfunctiong driver was not appealing, either.

Big shame! I loved VFIO :)

* https://github.com/64kramsystem/vga-passthrough

I mantain a guide for setting up VFIO (https://github.com/saveriomiroddi/vga-passthrough), which I frequently use.

My conclusion is: for machines that are compatible with it, VFIO works very well. The technology itself is stable, so working on photoshop/game development etc. (from a technological perspective, there's no distinction between the two tasks) is not distinguishable from working on native.

I had VFIO on 4 machines I think, and one had problems which I couldn't solve, while the others worked well.

When used with QEMU, it requires some system settings and QEMU flags etc., but it's straightforward.

To put it in another way: if one wants to use VFIO seriously, it's best using hardware known to work well, rather trying to cram VFIO on a not very compatible ones.

And also: one needs to be pratical. An USB soundcard solves countless hours of attempts to use the host's Pulseaudio system (meh).

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.

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

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.

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 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...

I get "verification failed" error when using https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

I also see there is KVM-OSX which looks to be actively maintained, but I haven't heard anything about it.

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

I think this could be of some use to you https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

i cloned that repository