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VirtualBox Beta Supports OS X As Guest OS On Macs
milesw writes "In addition to a slew of new features, VirtualBox 3.2.0 Beta 1 offers experimental support for Mac OS X guests running on Apple hardware. Got to wonder whether Larry Ellison discussed this with Steve Jobs beforehand, given Apple's refusal to allow virtualizing their (non-server) OS."
Mac != Mac OSX
Macs can run all kinds of OSs these days through boot camp.
Apple's policy has always been (as far as I know), you can virtualize OS X all you want, but you have to have Apple hardware. I thought you had to have OS X Server as the host OS, but I guess that wasn't the case.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The fact you can run OS X as a guest on a Mac does not imply you are actually using Mac OS X as host OS. You can use Boot Camp to run Linux or Windows as host OS on a Mac as well. My question is: can you run OS X as a guest in such a situation, or does it only work from an OS X host OS?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
OS X has been working for quite some time on VMWare with a Windows/Linux host. It's been even hacked to work with AMD processors on the host, so from a technical standpoint, nothing new.
Frankly, I'm getting really tired of all the artificial limitations that Jobs is placing left and right for developers and consumers alike. A bit offtopic, but yesterday I realized that while quicktime pro can export to MP4 as well as MOV, if you want to use H264, you need to use the MOV container. Why? When Microsoft did that with WMA vs MP3, people complained. Loudly.
Mac is the hardware, OS X is the operating system.
The title states OS X as the guest, Mac as the platform, but does not name the host OS. It doesn't state the host OS in the stub, either.
Improve your reading comprehension before you start slating others for theirs.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Why are you slamming the OP? Do you not know about Bootcamp with Windows or Linux running as the host OS on Mac hardware? The title, and summary only indicate you have to have the hardware, not what host OS you need to be running. This interests me considerable as I would much rather have Windows 7 running native on my Mac pro as it would allow it to use 8 cores instead of the 2 that VMware Fusion can expose to it. The only reason I don't run Windows as the native OS is that I would have to reboot to use the Mac software I use to test.
As my sig says, I support Mac OS in the enterprise, I don't prefer to use it for my normal day to day work as Entourage is pathetic compared to Outlook, and has serious connectivity issues.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
That's not true. You can virtualize OS X Server starting with Leopard as long as it's on Apple hardware (host does not need to be OS X, in fact Parallels has a bare metal version for XServes). They've never let you virtualize OS X, just the last 2 versions of Server.
The other question, of course, is whether the "On Macs" requirement is technical in some serious sense(any one of the modern virtualization tricks where you pass as much as possible through to the hardware, rather than trapping it and crunching it in software emulation depending somehow on EFI, or the particular chipsets of Macs, or something of that nature), or whether it is a purely artificial constraint, that exists to keep Oracle out of range of Steve Jobs' eye lasers...
If the former, turning it into a general purpose "Virtualbox virtualizes OSX" will require some nontrivial work. If the latter, I'm assuming that there will be a third party build of VirtualBox(large swaths of which are, after all, FOSS) supporting OSX on arbitrary hosts floating around within a matter of days, or even hours.
Well, "Mac OS X guest on a Mac from a Windows or Linux host" implies running another OS on Mac/Apple hardware, does it not?
I'd love to run OS X as guest OS on my dev machine (not Apple) to test web pages on OS X Safari instead of powering up the old MacBook.
Yes, it's webkit and I can use Chrome but still some form elements render differently.
... with Windows ... running as the host OS on Mac hardware?
[Shudder]
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The host doesn't matter, what matters is the underlying hardware. Mac OS X unmodified will only be able to start if it runs on Mac hardware.
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=134642&sid=e4351fbfef3e3c91d57db22fc2af2cb9#p134642
No more out of the bottle than the hackintosh community. Apple will just sue vendors who allow people to bypass the license, and all that will be left are a tiny group of committed hackers who will be small enough for Apple to ignore, hopefully. Really, most people in the free software and open source software communities are staying away from Apple because of their hostility, and businesses will not want to risk a lawsuit from Apple.
Palm trees and 8
I have been running OS X virtualized in VMWare for the last 6 months now. Unfortunately Apple won't release their SDK for Windows, so I had to look into it. Oh and its running on an AMD host as well. Heres the (30 minute) guide:
http://adbge.org/installing-snow-leopard-as-a-virtual-machine/
The actual change log for 3.2.0 beta (http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=30287) merely states:
> Experimental support for Mac OS X guests
There's nowt about running the OSX guest on Apple hardware but maybe this is stated somewhere else.
The biggest threat that comes from virtualized MacOS is the possibility that people might be
able to try MacOS without any real investment in the process. They could easily and cheaply
determine for themselves if it is "all that".
You will no longer need to be a "geek" to give MacOS a serious test drive.
That will likely cause all of Apple's mystique to evaporate.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The other question, of course, is whether the "On Macs" requirement is technical in some serious sense(any one of the modern virtualization tricks where you pass as much as possible through to the hardware, rather than trapping it and crunching it in software emulation depending somehow on EFI, or the particular chipsets of Macs, or something of that nature), or whether it is a purely artificial constraint, that exists to keep Oracle out of range of Steve Jobs' eye lasers...
There is the license, the hardware, and the DMCA.
The license says you can run _one_ copy of MacOS X on one _Apple branded_ computer. I think it is quite clear that "Apple branded computer" means the actual physical hardware. The Macintosh hardware contains one chip containing a key, and MacOS X checks for the existence of the key. Now with virtualisation, the virtualisation level _must_ pass access to this chip down to the real hardware, otherwise MacOS X won't install. Passing the access through to the real chip is legal, because it only allows the end user what the license allowed him or her to do anyway.
It is obviously not difficult at all for the virtualisation software to emulate the presence of this chip. If they did that, then you could run MacOS X on _any_ computer. Putting that capability into the virtualisation software would be circumventing Apple's copy protection and fall straight under the DMCA and gets charged, as Psystar found out, at $2500 per case. I don't think any company with money that makes virtual machines will try that.
> windows 7 is better/an improvement/what vista should have been. Doesn't mean any of us care or
> intend to use it other than it being practically required for enterprise employees at the moment.
I am not sure I would consider being forced to use MacOS an improvement.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You shudder, but I'll see you one better: Our primary server at work is some kind of Mac tower with two quad-core Xeon processors. It runs Windows Server 2008 R2 which in turn uses Virtual Box to host CentOS VMs for routing, DHCP/DNS, a LAMP stack, and a firewall.
Linux on Windows on Mac. We call it "Turducken."
DATABASE WOW WOW
OS X is a thin BSD compatibility layer on top a heavily hacked Mach microkernel. It's about as much "UNIX" as Microsoft Windows is UNIX, "UNIX 03" brand name shenanigans notwithstanding.