- #Kvm virtualization for mac mac os x
- #Kvm virtualization for mac mac os
- #Kvm virtualization for mac plus
#Kvm virtualization for mac mac os
No version of PowerPC Mac OS currently has support for VirtIO devices yet either, so there is no graphics or disk acceleration. Unfortunately, the USB tablet is only supported by 10.3 Panther and up. The most useful to us is the USB tablet, which allows QEMU to detect when the mouse is within the QEMU window without having to grab it and makes using the emulator a lot more seamless.
We will only be using the mac99 platform since it provides the best combination of flexibility and compatibility. QEMU provides two platform profiles, g3beige, a Gossamer Beige Power Mac G3, as the name implies, and mac99, essentially a Sawtooth G4. For our Power Mac hardware emulation, we will use QEMU, which can use KVM (and KVMPPC) to accelerate the processor, and QEMU provides the rest of the platform. Let's first talk about whether KVM is the way you want to go. KVM-PR was the original method of virtualization on PowerPC Linux, descending from the venerable old Mac-on-Linux project (which had its own peculiar hypercalls), and a specialized form of this method is how OS X runs Classic on 10.4 and earlier. Because it's user mode, it can be nested (a KVM-PR guest can run inside of another KVM-PR guest, as well as inside a KVM-HV guest). Instructions which aren't supported natively are trapped and executed just like supervisor-level instructions, and everything else can still run on the metal. However, KVM-PR can also emulate other instructions and their desired behaviour, which theoretically allows it to act like any supported Power ISA or PowerPC CPU, including a G3, G4 or G5.
That means it must trap and emulate supervisor-level instructions on behalf of the guest, which is much slower. Unlike KVM-HV, KVM-PR runs strictly in user mode, or what IBM docs refer to as the "Problem State." It does run as a kernel module, so it's not in user space, but it does not depend on the hardware which powers KVM-HV and thus only runs user-level instructions. Since no version of OS X ran on a POWER8 (let alone a POWER9), we won't be dealing with it further for the purposes of this article. However, it cannot be nested (you can't run a KVM-HV guest inside a KVM-HV guest, though you can run a KVM-PR guest more on that in a moment), and most importantly, it supports only virtualizing the same processor generation or the one immediately prior. It uses the hardware support in later Power ISA CPUs, so it's overall faster, particularly when many supervisor-level instructions must be executed. KVM-HV is the more modern of the two and the most technically like hypervisors on other architectures. KVMPPC comes in two flavours, KVM-PR ("PRoblem") and KVM-HV ("HyperVisor") both work in big and little endian modes. We'll address that pain point in another "First Person" post coming soooooon.Īnyway, a brief digression before we begin, for those unfamiliar with how KVM works on Power ISA. The other is the damn Command key working like it's supposed to.
#Kvm virtualization for mac plus
It shouldn't be a surprise that the common architecture was a big plus for me, and it's possible to run OS X with reduced emulation overhead on the processor using the same Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) scheme used for virtualization on other platforms.Įmulation is of course just one of the things us old Mac users would like working properly on the new Power hotness.
#Kvm virtualization for mac mac os x
Talospace is a spinoff from the TenFourFox Development blog, which for those unfamiliar with it, is a Firefox fork maintained for Power Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5.
0 kommentar(er)
