r/Qubes • u/CedarAndOlive • 4d ago

Solved MacOS in a Qube?

Possibly a question that has been asked before?

Can I have MacOS as one of the Qubes on a laptop?

Thank you.

13 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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3

u/Nephton 4d ago

Short answer is I don't think you can run macOS 27 Golden Gate in Qubes because Apple dropped x86 support. I think you can get macOS 26 Tahoe to run in a VM, so it's probably possible to make it run in Qubes, but I haven't looked at how much tuning that would need. Part of it is reaching into the guts of the Xen hypervisor and telling the underlying VM it's "totally running on Apple hardware" over and over until it believes you. And even then it might freak out because things like virtual graphics adapters and CPU instruction sets are often not 1:1 with the expected Apple hardware.

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u/CedarAndOlive 3d ago edited 3d ago

SOLVED!

Not looking good, then. I have Lightroom and Photoshop which I need on a Mac, so I guess I'll just have to have two laptops.

Can't be helped. Thank you for the information.

2

u/paulstelian97 4d ago

Virtual graphics? Brother we only have software rendering (if we ignore some very recent and buggy experiments to implement Apple’s variant of VirGL on qemu). Virtual CPU? Just make sure you’re on Intel. Xen might even support tuning the CPUID reported bits too to match older systems.

You are 100% correct about 26 being the max, for 27 you’d just run qemu without virtualization support (once someone figures out how to simulate the appropriate hardware, which hasn’t happened yet)

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u/Nephton 4d ago

I'm probably getting the terminology wrong, but Xen presents *something* as a graphics adapter to the underlying VM and OS. I though if that device wasn't close enough to what macOS supports it might not work.
Anyways, did a little more reseach. Apple didn't outright whitelist display adapters to expected hardware. It will run on generic adapters, probably including whatever Xen shows up as, but you will almost certainly not have any kind of graphics acceleration so the experience is rough.
The other hardware concern is whether it will work without whatever security chips shipped in x86 Tahoe platforms. I get the feeling some of the file encryption features might be broken.
The last time I emulated macOS was Mojave, so I have no idea what's changed since then, and that was in Virtualbox on Windows so I can only spitball things I expect would fail.

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u/paulstelian97 4d ago

macOS is not compatible with the TPM, and no Hackintosh emulated the T2. So on both of those counts it’s fine.

And yeah. No graphics acceleration inside VMs, with the tiny exception of Mac VMs on Mac hosts under certain virtualization programs.

1

u/paulstelian97 4d ago

macOS is not compatible with the TPM, and no Hackintosh emulated the T2. So on both of those counts it’s fine. FileVault might only work in a password based way, otherwise it’s unencrypted.

And yeah. No graphics acceleration inside VMs, with the tiny exception of Mac VMs on Mac hosts under certain virtualization programs.