[benologist]

Can macOS virtual machines ever be performant enough to use as a workstation? So far I have only tried setting it up in VMWare and VirtualBox, the performance wasn't there but I haven't dedicated a GPU or drive to it yet. It would be so convenient to decouple macOS from Mac hardware.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I run macOS (currently Mojave) on a 8 core, 16GB KVM on top of Debian on a 16 core 64GB Ryzen. It's faster than the (older) Mac Mini I used to use for everything I've tried on it. I don't know how it compares to current apple hardware, but for my purposes (doing the bits of macOS-specific code development in a large native cross-platform application), it's about as perfect as it gets.

[mjayhn]

The problem is cocoa performs terribly without gpu acceleration and nobody has figured out how to get around that, there are some tweaks to get OSX running in vmware and wherever else but you never wind up with working GPU acceleration so not only can you not change the resolution once you turn it on (iirc, may be wrong here), it's refresh rate is horrendous. If you ever used Windows before it installs the gpu drivers where the window manager is all weird and unoptimized and glitchy, it's that but worse.

It's been a long time since I played with macos vfio passthru stuff but maybe that's a way around it nowadays. There's a little /r/vfio community that tries to tackle it pretty frequently.

Hopefully someone else has more recent details than me, I'm back to using osx hardware now that the 16" mbp lets me have 32gb.

[schlopper]

QEMU/KVM/VFIO has come a long way. If you have a MacOS-supported GPU and working IOMMU (AMD) or VT-d (Intel), then you can achieve near-native MacOS performance for your CPU/GPU combo.