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foxlet / macOS-Simple-KVM

Tools to set up a quick macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM.
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Could OVMF non-volatile variables replace Clover? #358

Open anthonyryan1 opened 3 years ago

anthonyryan1 commented 3 years ago

I just thought I'd raise this issue to create a thread for discussion.

Another project, aiming to accomplish the same thing for VirtualBox users has a working installation that doesn't require either Clover or OpenCore. It's vanilla macOS all the way down.

https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox

I've personally verified it's working as intended and I've installed a handful of macOS updates including major versions (Big Sur). So far that VirtualBox instance seems remarkably durable through OS updates.

I'm speculating that we could achieve a similar no-bootloader setup with OVMF non-volatile variables. It could eliminate the need for the ESP drive / binary blob which some users have taken issue with.

anthonyryan1 commented 3 years ago

it's also noteworthy that the Clover-free approach ensures System Integrity Protection (SIP) is enabled. While with macOS-Simple-KVM, we get an install that lacks SIP and has a big warning that updates will break the installation.

This can be verified with:

 csrutil status