virtualbox-org-svn-vbox-trunk VS dot

So my understanding – if you run VirtualBox on macOS, and you choose macOS as Guest OS type when creating your VM, it automatically turns GetKeyFromRealSMC on. That means you are using option (2) by default. You can always switch to option (1) instead if you want to, but if you are virtualising macOS-on-macOS, there is little reason to.

From reading the VirtualBox source code [0] – it also automatically enables GetKeyFromRealSMC if it detects Apple hardware, even if the host OS isn't macOS. So, if you install Windows on your Mac, and then create a macOS VM in VirtualBox, it will automatically select option (2) as well. (I think, they actually include the code to talk to the Apple SMC in their Windows and Linux kernel drivers too.)

(Note I haven't actually tried doing this myself, this is just what I gather from the source.)

[0] https://github.com/mdaniel/virtualbox-org-svn-vbox-trunk/blo...

Yes! https://github.com/kingdonb/dot/blob/ubuntu-vm/bin/qemu

This expects you're using the special qemu from the prior link, compiled with homebrew. (else I think there will be no virtio-vga-gl video driver?)

The guest OS is an Ubuntu VM. I think the instructions say to use a recent Fedora/Silverblue for a reason (there are some things that don't quite work right around window resizing.)

Each time I start the VM, it shows up with tiny tiny pixels and the menubar does not work. I switch to another app, switch back, go to the menu and enable "zoom to fit" and it's off to the races. Other things to be aware of, if you resize the window it actually scales the pixels, (which is OK and doesn't even have any noticeable perf impact because OpenGL, I guess)