Re: [Xen-devel] Xen Virtualized OSX

[Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Indeed, that'd make sense...
>
> Well, I'd imagine that if one could pass ctrl of a video card to a DomU
> machine, then that could open up a lot of fun possiblities not just for
> OSX.

Indeed, we live in interesting times.  Even more awesome would be to be able 
to pass multiple video cards to different guests but I believe this is not 
currently supported.

> The way I'd control the rid is get a VNC server running on the Dom0 
> machine and then remotely just control things through that - heck, it'd be
> especially fun as one could use VNC's webserver to control things. :)

Would be cool, yes.  I assume the current solution assumes that the user 
somehow net-logins to dom0.  I've not looked at it, just saw the changeset 
comments.

> I wonder exactly what else stands in the way of getting OSX to see a the
> native apple hardware from the DomU perspective? I'd imagine if there was
> EFI support for DomUs as well as control of whatever hardware addresses
> that must be contacted to verify the machine is "genuine" - then the DomU
> should be happy with unhacked osx. Though the osx86 project really has come
> a very long way.

Quite possibly true.  EFI support isn't available for domU as far as I know. I 
expect it will be, one day.  Beyond that I don't know how much of the 
hardware provided by default is supported by OS X out of the box.

There are obvious licensing issues and I doubt Apple would be particularly 
helpful support-wise about OS X running in a Xen VM, even on an Apple branded 
box.

Back in the old days, before x86 support in OS X, there was talk of porting 
the Darwin kernel to run as a Xen PV guest.  The PPC Xen project is, as far 
as I know, dead now and PPC Macs are fading into the past :-(  Possibly you 
could port Darwin x86 to run as a PV guest but I don't know who'd have the 
motivation to do that these days.

Cheers,
Mark

> Anyway, I'd work on it if I had the time, but no dice for now.
>
> Cheers friends.
>
> On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 1:09 PM, Mark Williamson <
>
> mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > Howdy gang - any idea if I could use Xen on my Mac Pro to run Windows
> > > in parallel to OSX and use both such that graphics apps have access to
> > > the actual graphics hardware?
> >
> > Uhhh, the answer is probably "Mostly no" ;-)
> >
> > I've recently seen some support committed to Xen to allow you to pass a
> > graphics adaptor to a domU, which is a step in the right direction for
> > what you're trying to achieve.  I don't believe it has support for run
> > time switching which domain has access to the graphics card, though,
> > which you would also seem to require.
> >
> > Also, MacOS X isn't going to boot under Xen without some hacking, I
> > think, since Xen's HVM mode emulates a conventional PC without EFI, etc. 
> > You could
> > possibly make a hacked version of OS X work.  I think somebody might have
> > got
> > OS X running in a Xen domain but I imagine the graphical performance of
> > the virtualised framebuffer would detract from the "Mac experience"
> > somewhat
> >
> > :-(
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Mark
> >
> > --
> > Push Me Pull You - Distributed SCM tool (
> > http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~maw48/pmpu/<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/%7Emaw48/pmp
> >u/> )



-- 
Push Me Pull You - Distributed SCM tool (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~maw48/pmpu/)

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel