Are MacOS guests VMs supported?

[rastaman]

Hi all,

I have searched a bit and didn't found any use of LimaVM to host MacOS VMs. I have an use case for this (a MacOS Jenkins build agent), and would like to know if it already exist and i have missed it and if it doesn't exist if it would be ok to add such support to LimaVM despite its name :-) If i am not wrong we use https://github.com/Code-Hex/vz which support MacOS guests, so that should be only some plumbery to add the support? I would give it a try if it sounds ok and it doesn't exist.

Thanks in advance for your answers and your time,
Best regards

Edit: That doesn't look easy, there is lot of stuff to adapt to have support for all the features, but still i would be glad to be wrong :-)

[jandubois]

As you found out, it is not currently supported.

I also think it would be too much work to even try, but if you think you can make it work, by all means go for it. I would find it useful as well.

I would probably at other macOS VM projects to see if they can be adapted more easily. E.g. something like https://github.com/cirruslabs/tart

[rastaman]

Spot on @jandubois , thanks! Yes, tart fulfill all my needs in fact, and given all the work done on it i think it would be a waste of time to add all its configuration tweaks to Lima. Thanks for the hint!

[AkihiroSuda]

I don't think it would be a waste of time. PR will be welcomed, at least from my side.

[AkihiroSuda]

It should be also noted that tart is proprietary.

[jandubois]

PR will be welcomed, at least from my side.

I said the same thing:

if you think you can make it work, by all means go for it. I would find it useful as well.

I just think it would take more time than I would be willing to spend on it myself.

[afbjorklund]

Then again "mama" is a nice project name, no ? 🤡

[afbjorklund]

There was support for FreeBSD guests, which was a little easier (with QEMU at least) but didn't have much of a use case...

• *BSD support (VM) #1096
• Support for FreeBSD guests ? #1508

Even the read-only and non-standard variants like CoreOS and Container Linux are struggling to find their reason (in Lima).

• Any plan to support Container Linux, such as CoreOS, Flatcar? #1406
• Flatcar Container Linux support #1372

One of the issues was that neither supported cloud-init, so you had to resort to other means to do the basic configuration.

It also was bigger and slower, so it wasn't so useful as a base shared VM just to run containers on (like with WSL on Windows)

---

The container support on Mac is even worse, even if it does have some sandboxing and chrooting (like used in MacPorts).

And of course there are some licensing issues since it (macOS) is not Open Source anymore, and Pure Darwin struggles...

But I think that the OS could be added, and use an external VM?

Then again, that's mostly a thin wrapper around sshocker.

[afbjorklund]

Then I remembered that (both) Mac's sshfs are proprietary.