Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v6 0/2] apic: bump emulated lapic version to 0x14

[Gabriel L. Somlo]

On Wed, May 07, 2014 at 12:37:43PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> So Gabriel what's left for OS X guests to run out of the box (with
> the right key for -device applesmc of course)?

Once Gerd imports a new SeaBIOS blob, QEMU should be able to boot
OS X "out of the box". Of course, there are stil some caveats:

1. We still need the Chameleon bootloader (to work around EFI):

        - by loading only its stage-2 component (named "boot")
          via the "-kernel boot" command line option to QEMU
          (this is how I'm starting it right now)

        - by installing all of Chameleon to the guest disk image,
          the way hackintoshes do (I haven't tried this, but thought
          it's worth mentioning).

2. e1000 flakiness:

        - link negotiation is flaky (I have a patch, but was told
          and agree that it morally belongs in the BIOS layer)

        - Mavericks doesn't like the current e1000 model
          (E1000_DEV_ID_82540EM); there was a patch sent to the list
          to allow selecting among different e1000 models, I think
          it was:

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2014-02/msg04411.html

          Mavericks likes E1000_DEV_ID_82545EM_COPPER, but Windows
          won't work with that, so picking which model to use from
          the command line would be nice. The patch seems abandoned
          at this point, so I might contact the author and ask if
          he minds me picking it up and continuing to polish it until
          it's acceptable :)

        - virtio-net works with an "aftermarket" driver, verified to
          work both in MountainLion and Mavericks. It's what I'm using
          right now.

AFAIK, that's everything :)

There's a GSoC student (Reza Jelveh) who will be working on trying
booting OS X with OVMF (piix only for now).

I'm toying with the idea of maybe getting OVMF to work with Q35,
but I have absolutely no idea yet how big of a job that might be,
and whether I'm mentally equipped to tackle it myself, in my "spare time" :)

Last but not least, I keep a "current state of OS X on QEMU/KVM"
writeup online at

http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~somlo/OSXKVM/

so any new and interesting developments should show up there in a
reasonably timely way...

Cheers,
--Gabriel