Thread: A new Mac-on-Linux version with KVM support is available

Hi All,

Just for info: A new Mac-on-Linux version with KVM support is available.

Installation:

You have to compile Mac-on-Linux from svn (svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/mac-on-linux/code/trunk mac-on-linux-code).

Screenshot:



QEMU/PPC with KVM also supports Mac OS X in a virtual machine. But Mac OS X is slower on QEMU/KVM than on MoL/KVM.

Screenshots:

There is a special thread in the Amigaworld forum about MoL: http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/...order=0#740661
You can ask your questions there.

So if I have an old PowerBook G4 with Tiger 10.4, I could create a partition to add a Debian PPC linux distro (MoL in this case) and point to my Tiger OS X drive and run it?

Originally Posted by tgalati4

So if I have an old PowerBook G4 with Tiger 10.4, I could create a partition to add a Debian PPC linux distro (MoL in this case) and point to my Tiger OS X drive and run it?

Yes, it is. If you use an old version of Debian with kernel 2.X then you can compile MoL with kernel modules. But if you work with a new Debian distribution like Wheezy, Sid etc, you need a Linux kernel with KVM kernel modul and a compiled MoL with KVM support.

Edit:

Configure instructions to start MoL/KVM-PR

AmigaOne/Power Mac/IBM POWER8:

modprobe kvm-pr

ifconfig tun1 192.168.41.1

/etc/init.d/tinyproxy status

MoL/KVM:

sudo kextload MolEnet.kext

sudo kextload MolAudioDevice.kext

Just for info: I have updated Mac OS X to version 10.4.11 on MoL/KVM-PR.

Quote Alexander Graf:

The MOL kernel module was designed with PPC32 hosts and guests in mind.

While that's all great when running on PPC32 hosts, it makes life really
hard on PPC64 hosts, as the MOL kernel module doesn't work there.

Furthermore it also never got upstreamed. So every new kernel revision
might break it.

Recently I implemented KVM for PowerPC64 though. So we now have a common
virtualization framework inside the kernel that gives us easy virtualization
access to PPC32 and PPC64 guest VMs.

This patch implements a simple backend module to interact with KVM. That way
KVM can be used to virtualize the CPU. Everything else still goes through
MOL.

With this patch applied and my recent patches to KVM (see the kvm-ppc ML
archive) I'm happily running a 10.4.11 Mac OS X VM on a 970MP system.
This should also enable G5 and PS3 hosts, though I haven't tried it out
there yet.

Please keep in mind that you need to run 32 bit userspace with a 64 bit kernel
for this to work.
MOL heavily relies on sizeof(guest GPR) == sizeof(void*) == sizeof(int)

Thanks Christian for sharing this.

I've had a quick go and mol does indeed compile when you select kvm. What networking compile options did you choose and can you explain more about the ifconfig and tinyproxy commands you've suggested?

Unfortunately the Ubuntu 32 bit SMP kernel doesn't have KVM compiled so for my quick test I installed the last non-smp kernel from oneiric (11.10). I haven't got a Mac OS X operating system installed yet, but mol seemed to start up.

I haven't got a kvm-pr module, my module is just called kwm. I don't know much about kvm/kvm-pr, what is the difference and did you do anything to compile it?

I'll probably compile a non-smp version of the the precise kernel (or maybe a newer version).

Originally Posted by rsavage

Thanks Christian for sharing this.

I'll probably compile a non-smp version of the the precise kernel (or maybe a newer version).

@r:

I'd agree that for PPC 12.04 is probably your best choice in the use of your time . . . 14.04 still seems wonky on my iBook G4 . . . .

e.e.p.