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Documentation to set up a simple macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM.

By@FoxletFox, and the help of many others. Find this useful? You can donateon Coinbase orPaypal!.

New to macOS and KVM? Checkthe FAQs.

You'll need a Linux system withqemu (3.1 or later),python3,pip and the KVM modules enabled. A Mac isnot required. Some examples for different distributions:

sudo apt-get install qemu-system qemu-utils python3 python3-pip  # for Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, and PopOS.sudo pacman -S qemu python python-pip python-wheel  # for Arch.sudo xbps-install -Su qemu python3 python3-pip   # for Void Linux.sudo zypper in qemu-tools qemu-kvm qemu-x86 qemu-audio-pa python3-pip  # for openSUSE Tumbleweedsudo dnf install qemu qemu-img python3 python3-pip # for Fedorasudo emerge -a qemu python:3.4 pip # for Gentoo

Runjumpstart.sh to download installation media for macOS (internet required). The default installation uses Catalina, but you can choose which version to get by adding either--high-sierra,--mojave, or--catalina. For example:

./jumpstart.sh --mojave

Note: You can skip this if you already haveBaseSystem.img downloaded. If you haveBaseSystem.dmg, you will need to convert it with thedmg2img tool.

Create an empty hard disk usingqemu-img, changing the name and size to preference:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 MyDisk.qcow2 64G

and add it to the end ofbasic.sh:

    -drive id=SystemDisk,if=none,file=MyDisk.qcow2 \    -device ide-hd,bus=sata.4,drive=SystemDisk \

Note: If you're running on a headless system (such as on Cloud providers), you will need-nographic and-vnc :0 -k en-us for VNC support.

Then runbasic.sh to start the machine and install macOS. Remember to partition in Disk Utility first!

1. If instead of QEMU, you'd like to import the setup into Virt-Manager for further configuration, just runsudo ./make.sh --add.
2. After running the above command, addMyDisk.qcow2 as storage in the properties of the newly added entry for VM.

If you're using a cloud-based/headless system, you can useheadless.sh to set up a quick VNC instance. Settings are defined through variables as seen in the following example. VNC will start on port5900 by default.

HEADLESS=1 MEM=1G CPUS=2 SYSTEM_DISK=MyDisk.qcow2 ./headless.sh

You're done!

To fine-tune the system and improve performance, look in thedocs folder for more information onadding memory, setting upbridged networking, addingpassthrough hardware (for GPUs), tweakingscreen resolution, and enabling sound features.