This is the first time I read about this. How on earth is this not an April’s fools joke?
Apple allows you to run a maximum of 2 virtual machines on Apple hardware.
Someone is going to get sued by Apple for going against this part of the license agreement and I must say I really like that thought because the result of that trial will give clarity to the rest of us.
We had to deal with a gray area in our project as well. DeepL does not allow use of their translator in critical infrastructure. Our client is in the transportation business and has been using DeepL for years to translate emails. They wanted to integrate DeepL into a customer portal that we develop for them. When we told them that we will not be complicit in breaking DeepL’s license agreement, they weren’t too happy.
Apple has largely left the Hackintosh community alone. It seems like they're not interested in going after anything but those trying to commercialise it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psystar_Corporation
I think there is a different perspective - MacBooks are great development machines, pretty much everything builds without modification, if you need a true linux environment you can always spin one up with docker. I’d bet you that people running MacOS in VMs leads to people running MacOS on their shiny new MacBook.
If you had told me thirty years ago that one day I’d be developing on a Mac I would have laughed, but once I had one I realized developing under Windows was a pain - everything is unnecessarily difficult because Microsoft wants you to develop FOR windows and they want you giving money to all their partners who forever have their hands out, and they make everything else hard.
It’s like a pain that never goes away - you can learn to ignore it but at some level it’s always there.
I hate to give Apple any ideas... but I've always wondered why macOS/iOS support falling back to software rendering, when all of their devices ship with a known GPU configuration. Without that fallback, getting the OS running on non-Apple hardware would take a lot more work.
Oh wow I didn’t know about that. That’s huge. I remember people some time ago buying dozens of Macs to create their own CI/CD with racks of half open MacBooks running 24/365.
The general consenus I've seen is that 1) projects/code that enables MacOS to be emulated is legal, but 2) running MacOS VMs on non-Apple hardware is a violation of the EULA you agree to when installing MacOS.
So if it's on an Apple device (even one not running MacOS as the host) it's fine, otherwise it's a violation of the EULA, and something a business probably doesn't want to get tangled in.
I recently wanted to build Python wheels for a whole bunch of Python versions and packages on Mac ARM64. I ended up using OSX-KVM, and then using cibuildwheel to crossbuild to arm64. Pretty dang easy.
I set up OSX-KVM (https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM) and it worked really well. Having archlinux is a huge plus for this (it's why the docker image uses it), as qemu is super simple to setup and get running. Was surprised how easy it was, but given how much effort the bootloaders have had over the recent years for Hackintosh, qemu users can just yoink that bootloader and use it.
IIRC, when compiling any iOS apps, etc. you need a Mac machine. I remember in the past, when I was creating CI/CD pipelines we had to ensure that there was a Mac Mini or some other machine that we had access to in order to automate this.
Seems like this solution would make it much simpler, as we used Docker for everything else.
I've set up some tests that require OS X and usually set up remote VMs for that. This could be a nice alternative to run those using regular (and cheaper) linux instances.
I know you can do the same with KVM but nothing beats a one liner command.
This is a regular VM. Specially it's qemu-kvm. The difference being that this is running qemu-kvm inside a container (remember, containers are mostly just processes). The advantage this gives you is that your run command is much simpler than the alternative.
Because you don't know how to configure KVM or don't want to bother, I guess. This project just wraps another project for setting up normal KVM guests running macOS.
Readit News
https://www.vice.com/en/article/akdmb8/open-source-app-lets-...
Apple allows you to run a maximum of 2 virtual machines on Apple hardware.
Someone is going to get sued by Apple for going against this part of the license agreement and I must say I really like that thought because the result of that trial will give clarity to the rest of us.
We had to deal with a gray area in our project as well. DeepL does not allow use of their translator in critical infrastructure. Our client is in the transportation business and has been using DeepL for years to translate emails. They wanted to integrate DeepL into a customer portal that we develop for them. When we told them that we will not be complicit in breaking DeepL’s license agreement, they weren’t too happy.
If you had told me thirty years ago that one day I’d be developing on a Mac I would have laughed, but once I had one I realized developing under Windows was a pain - everything is unnecessarily difficult because Microsoft wants you to develop FOR windows and they want you giving money to all their partners who forever have their hands out, and they make everything else hard.
It’s like a pain that never goes away - you can learn to ignore it but at some level it’s always there.
While _this_ usecase obviously isn't officially supported, it does seem like they support VMs in some capacity officially.
Dead Comment
If that’s possible then it’s huge.
Edit: Best way to know is to just do it. I’ll try this and report back.
Great they have that now!
1: https://hub.docker.com/r/jangrewe/gitlab-ci-android
I’ve considered using this for running simulators but I always get asked about how legal this is.
So if it's on an Apple device (even one not running MacOS as the host) it's fine, otherwise it's a violation of the EULA, and something a business probably doesn't want to get tangled in.
I personally wouldn't have any scruples using this for testing/building OSS, but I would also think twice about using it at my job.
I set up OSX-KVM (https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM) and it worked really well. Having archlinux is a huge plus for this (it's why the docker image uses it), as qemu is super simple to setup and get running. Was surprised how easy it was, but given how much effort the bootloaders have had over the recent years for Hackintosh, qemu users can just yoink that bootloader and use it.
Seems like this solution would make it much simpler, as we used Docker for everything else.
I've set up some tests that require OS X and usually set up remote VMs for that. This could be a nice alternative to run those using regular (and cheaper) linux instances.
I know you can do the same with KVM but nothing beats a one liner command.
> docker: Error response from daemon: error gathering device information while adding custom device "/dev/kvm": no such file or directory.
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