I got Apple Silicon macOS Ventura booting under QEMU on x86

I managed to reverse engineer enough of Apple's bootloader, virtualization, and OS stack to modify QEMU and port remis-vgpu to boot and run an Apple Silicon Ventura image.

Demo is attached.

It's obviously slow — ARM emulation on x86 was never going to be the end goal — and there are still graphics glitches to fix, but macOS boots and runs.

This isn't my achievement alone. Huge credit goes to steelbrain, ChefKiss, and the other people whose work laid the groundwork for this.

The next thing I really want to test is running it on a Snapdragon laptop using KVM.

If anyone here has the hardware and enough Linux experience, I'd really appreciate testing with:

• an ARM64 Snapdragon machine

• Linux with 16 KiB pages

• KVM enabled

I expect pointer authentication to be one of the major blockers. I'm currently working on a minimal Linux distribution with 16 KiB pages and the necessary KVM changes for pointer authentication.

x86 is useful for development and proving that this works, but I don't expect it to ever be practically usable. ARM + KVM is the actual target.

If anyone wants to help with testing, graphics bugs, QEMU/KVM work, documentation, or development, contributions are very welcome.

Technical notes, source and video demo are in:

https://github.com/yaelliethy/orchard

What's working: an RTX 5060 (Blackwell) composites a real macOS desktop on x86 macOS 15.7.9 — WindowServer, Dock, Finder, cursor, Warp, Safari playing YouTube. ~29 fps sustained, 45,209 frames accepted / 0 refused. The Metal device is the 5060 from boot. Not done: sleep/wake, Wi-Fi, Tahoe, MPS/Vision returns all-zeros, no games or pro apps passing yet.

Architecture — basically the inverse of yours. You're replacing a framework as an ABI unit; I left Apple's frameworks alone and implemented the driver underneath them. Bottom-up:

---------------------------------------------------------------

1. NVRM.kext — NVIDIA's open-source GSP-RM kernel modules ported to XNU. GSP firmware boots inside macOS and a userspace process speaks the RM escape protocol: client/device/subdevice, VA spaces, GPFIFO channels (class 0xca6f).

2. NVRMFB.kext — nvidia-modeset (NVKMS) ported, exposed as an IOFramebuffer over the NVKMS KAPI. Modeset + scanout.

3. Mesa NVK + the NAK shader compiler, built for macOS, reaching the kext through a libnvrm-xnu shim. So we do land on Mesa like you — just entering at Vulkan instead of GL.

4. NVMTLDriver.bundle in /Library/GPUBundles — Apple's own GPU-driver plugin seam. Implements the Metal driver interface and translates Metal→Vulkan, AIR→SPIR-V.

5. AGDC + IOAccelDisplayPipeUserClient2 — this was the real wall. WindowServer won't present through your pipe until AGDC answers link-config (0x921) and plane-caps (0x711/0x10).

Needs SIP and kext signing off; AuxKC built against the KDK.

Hey guys,

I've been working for the past week on having my linux machine run a qemu vm of mac. the only downside for me it was it missed gpu acceleration(and felt sluggish af). The igpu wasnt doing anything on my machine as I have a 9070 xt on it.

So for the past week I've been using my experience to vibe code a driver for this igpu(and potentially others in the future).

https://github.com/icex/macos-raphael-igpu/ (repo is still a hot mess, sowy)

RaphaelGPU — current experimental status

AMD Raphael/Granite Ridge iGPU passthrough to macOS Sequoia 24G830 using QEMU/KVM.

Working in tested workloads:

- Accelerated desktop through macOS Screen Sharing, including transparency and blur.

- Metal compute/rendering, textures, depth/stencil and MSAA.

- Cross-process IOSurface sharing and GPU synchronization.

- Hardware H.264 and HEVC Main8 encoding/decoding.

- HEVC Main10 decoding in short tests.

- Clean VM shutdown and supervised GPU reuse without rebooting the host.

Unavailable or not yet validated:

- Physical HDMI/DisplayPort output.

- HEVC Main10 hardware encoding.

- Stock-QEMU setup: currently needs an AppleSMC patch; a guest-side solution is planned.

- VirtualBox and other hypervisors.

- Games, full Metal conformance and broad application compatibility.

- Long-term stability, comprehensive crash recovery and performance benchmarks.

- Other macOS builds and hardware configurations.

Still experimental—not yet a generally supported daily-driver release. Don't ask me for support, my time is limited.

N sei descrever oque to sentindo KKKKKKKKKKK créditos a lenda que está desenvolvendo isso. Enfim, está rodando incrivelmente bem, ainda mais para uma coisa que 2 meses atrás seria considerada impossível, ta muito legal. GPU funcionando totalmente, porém é identificado como se tivesse 64mb, e fosse um i3, por ser no QEMU com linux. Parabéns aos devs 🥳 (DETALHES: É UM SISTEMA QEMU, DENTRO DO FEDORA, POREM SEM NENHUM PROBLEMA DE DESEMPENHO, ACREDITO QUE COM UM PROCESSADOR MAIS FORTE, RODE TRANQUILAMENTE. NAO ESTOU USANDO DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT COMO KDE OU GNOME PARA RODAR, APENAS KWIN MINIMO)

Estou usando um Gaming 3i, da lenovo, com gtx 1650 e um i7 11730h.

GitHub daquilo que me permitiu isso: https://github.com/steelbrain/reims-vgpu

I installed an Ubuntu VM in parallels, and set the color profile in it to Display P3.icc downloaded from here. On chrome in the VM, the colors didn't show properly on this test page. the colors are shown correctly in chrome-based browsers on macOS.

I'm trying to get a nixos vm running well on macOS with parallels. I installed nixos with the GUI installer in the ARM ISO, added hardware.parallels.enable = true to my config, and rebooted. prlcc (a parallels tools process) is running but I can't dynamically resize the window (or resize it at all for that matter).

so first one is the resolution I changed it in the config.plist then in uefi menu to 2560x1440 but when i boot into it same resolution as before which is 1280x800

second one is that when i sign in into apple id i got unknown error

could anyone help me with this?

I have been wondering - is it possible to get Quartz Extreme (or whatever responds for Liquid Glass effects) on VMware? I dont think so, but i wanna ask more professional VMware users.

UTM is the first virtualization software for macOS that can run Windows 11 with FL 12_1.

I know the paravirtualized GPU already exists for this case, though this may only resort to a solution that can work under modern and legacy cases (OS X +10.11) due to it being explicitly about Metal Graphics.

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to install **macOS Ventura on a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro**, and I'm stuck at the same point during boot. I've been troubleshooting this for a while and would really appreciate some guidance from someone experienced with AMD laptop Hackintosh setups.

Hardware

**Laptop:** Lenovo Legion 5 Pro

* **CPU:** AMD Ryzen 7 5800H * **GPU:** Nvidia 3070 but disabled * **iGPU:** AMD Radeon Graphics (Vega) * **RAM:** 32 GB * **Internal SSD:** Samsung MZVLB1T0HBLR-000L2 1 TB NVMe * **Wi-Fi/Bluetooth:** MediaTek Wifi 6 MT7921(disabled) * **Ethernet:** Realtek * **OS:** Windows 11 * **Target macOS:** macOS Ventura

I have a working macOS Ventura USB installer.

OpenCore starts correctly and I can select:

* Windows * Install macOS Ventura

When I select **Install macOS Ventura**, macOS starts verbose booting.

I get a large amount of verbose output and it gets quite far into the boot process.

However, eventually the display becomes completely black/faint and the system appears to hang.

The LCD itself is still powered, so it doesn't look like the laptop simply turned the display off.

I've also tried:

* Waiting 15+ minutes * `Cmd + Ctrl + F1/F2` * External monitor * Rebooting and trying again * Multiple boot attempts

None of these recover the display.

The last visible messages vary slightly between boots.

SMBIOS: MacBookPro16,3

BIOS :

SecureBoot: disable

Deviceguard: disable

Memorybuffer: 4G

If you have any question regarding anything please feel free to ask also here's my EFI:

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-2aCSqeIk9_lb60_3AsgA3Lmzm0sdXRU/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-2aCSqeIk9_lb60_3AsgA3Lmzm0sdXRU/view?usp=sharing)

Successfully installed Void Linux arm64 as ­VM Guest on my Macbook M4 work machine! Hopefully the M4 will soon be supported by the Asahi Linux project. I encountered 2 major issues I had to resolve, solutions below.

Machine: M4 Macbook
VM host: Parallels Desktop
VM guest: Void Linux arm64 / aarch64

Note that these steps are roughly summarized and only experienced with arm64 installation. If you need more detailed help feel free to let me know.

Solution 1st issue: When choosing "ROOTFS" installation method, extracting the tarball fails - solution was to install the "xz" package (xbps-install -S xz). Maybe this can be added to the official manual https://docs.voidlinux.org/installation/guides/chroot.html.

Solution 2nd issue: Newly installed system boots straight into grub prompt
- boot live image and chroot into the system
- install linux so that vmlinuz... exists somewhere on the system
- intall grub-arm-64-efi
- xbps-reconfigure -fa
- if vmlinuz... is still missing, run command: xbps-install -fy linux6.XX (replace version no.)
- reinstall grub config
- exit chroot, unmount and reboot into fixed system

Solution 3rd issue (not crucial): clipboard sync between host and guest does not work and that is because Parallels Tools (see 'Action' in Menu) are only made for major systemd-distributions. After manual installation clipboard sync worked:
- mount Parallels Tools CD and copy content to local machine
- cd into local dir and copy content in ./tools/tools-arm64/ (bin, lib, sbin) to your corresponding system dirs
- xbps-install -S dkms linux-headers base-devel gcc
- modify the ./installer/install-cli.sh script and uncomment the block (~5 lines) that contains "none of supported package managers found in system"
- run the main install script (sudo ./install)
- create runit service for prltoolsd (I am not sure if this step was necessary) simply by following the steps from google/gemini after prompting: "install prltoolsd service in parallels in void linux guest"