Re: [Xen-users] Xen on a MacBook Pro? The ultimate developer setup?

[John Sherwood <jrs@xxxxxx>]

I've actually set up an MBP similarly before, but couldn't get OSX to install. Part of the appeal of using an MBP as the platform is that the IO peripherals (keyboard/trackpad) are connected as USB devices, which is much more passthrough friendly than the somewhat more common serial connections that I was finding on Dells. It's definitely doable if you want to use linux and windows VMs, but I'd suggest you'd want to engage the developers list if you want to try and passthrough whatever hardware is used by OSX to control installation.

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 9:07 PM, Andrew Bobulsky <rulerof@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello John,

On Apr 10, 2013, at 9:00 PM, John Sherwood <jrs@xxxxxx> wrote:

> I would suggest that Xen is not going to get you what you want; to my knowledge, you cannot simply virtualize OSX on top of Xen even on a Macbook, as OSX looks for a special piece of hardware that Xen does not (and perhaps legally cannot) virtualize. Passthrough may get you there, but that's a whole, huge can of worms that you should probably read more about before considering.

<snip>

I believe that, with a difficult-to-quantify amount of work, whatever
allows standard builds of OS X to run on a commodity x86/64 system
could theoretically also allow Xen to host the OS in an HVM DomU.  I
always figured that it has been done, but never looked into it beyond
some basic googling.

My interest in it was to see if it was possible to run it on a Xen
host with an IOMMU.  Install it alongside Windows and Linux, PCI
Hotplug a single video card around for the ultimate triple-boot :P

Just my two cents, of course! ;)

Cheers,
Andrew

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