Virtualizing OS X is a thing that can today be done very easily, with VMware and VirtualBox fully supporting it under OS X hosts. But what about virtualizing it using a bare metal hypervisor and QEMU? Under Linux? Finally I’ve got Mavericks fully working under QEMU (with no extra kexts(!)) and it wasn’t easy.
Impressive.
I’ve been watching the website linked to in the article for a while now, and it’s amazing how much easier the process has become.
Not long ago (the last manual patch was removed not a month ago), one would have to apply patches to each component before building, and there was some esoteric witchcraft involved at one point, which has disappeared. It’s really impressive that they’ve finally managed to get it all merged, and make this possible with a vanilla stack.
Hopefully, it won’t be too much longer until the stated goal of the article is achieved, and it disappears.
Edited 2014-06-05 08:22 UTC
I am wondering if more improvements are coming so the Mountain Lion part is no longer needed. That looks like a hack. And of course I would want it to do Yosemite (beta) instead of Mavericks….I can dream, right?
It’s funny how Apple is the last holdout that’s actively fighting against VDI, instead of embracing it and using it to grow its enterprise presence. I guess when they pulled the plug on Xserve they openly conceded that they don’t wanna play in the enterprise market (besides maybe the stagnant market for fat clients). It’d interesting to know what sort of infrastructure their online services like iCloud run (hope it’s FreeBSD or at least Linux, cause if it’s Windows, that’d be quite ironic).
Edited 2014-06-05 12:11 UTC
Apparently iCloud is built mainly on Azure with some Amazon services as well.
So mainly on Windows. Oh the sweet, sweet irony.
Citation necessary! I don’t think anyone really knows what it runs on, but Azure is most often named. However, Azure <> Windows so we still don’t know which OS it is running on (and who cares anyway?)
And there is no irony at all. Apple and Microsoft are pretty good friends. Apple seems to use Bing for search for example, and among their most popular apps and programs are several Microsoft offerings like Office. The rivalry is with Google/Android and “the enemy of my enemy…”
I didn’t say so, go respond to the parent.
Only if your memory is exceedingly short:
*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve
*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve_RAID
*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgrid
*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xsan (alright, this actually still ships, but the question remains for how long)
It’s just sad to see them tuck their tail in so deep and openly concede that they don’t know how to do this cloud computing thing, despite OSX’s very rich and deep Unix heritage. Multi-user, network-transparent with strict process isolation – Unix did cloud computing before it was cool.
I think you missed the point of the last comment. The poster was pointing out that Azure lets you host Linux images as well as Windows; so the assertion
Needed some evidence. Apple is big enough a client that for all you know they are running Darwin, or a custom headless version of OSX on top of azure.
Azure is an interesting system, it is worth understanding what they offer…
The InsanelyMac Forums has a patch available that will patch VMware Workstation* 8, 9, and 10 (and corresponding ESXi servers) to enable MacOSX support – beyond this patch, no special loaders or kexts required.
It actually works fairly well – It doesn’t quite restart or poweroff correctly it seems, and there’s no OpenGL support (Which also applies to VMware Fusion), but it appears stable (apart from a couple rare and minor graphics bugs).
*EDIT: Windows and Linux versions. Doesn’t patch VMware Fusion, for obvious reasons.
Edited 2014-06-05 16:47 UTC