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No apple silicon emulators exist yet, and probably wont for years


Qemu can somewhat do it already, with limitations - see https://youtu.be/oZqFYJVOUQo?si=wKaK6vLzfomESerY


Yes but the host he's using is Apple Silicon, I think what he's talking about is QEMU using Apple's Hypervisor Framework, which is what vmware Parallels, etc also use nowadays. Booting an apple silicon version of MacOS on non-Apple hardware probably isn't going to possible for a while as it would require emulation.

In 2021 Blackberry, surprisingly, wrote this article about getting emulating the XNU kernel and getting it running on non-apple hardware, but its just a terminal:

https://blogs.blackberry.com/en/2021/05/strong-arming-with-m...

Someone would have to write something that can emulate/abstract the apple iGPU to get anywhere near a usable GUI - I'm no expert but I don't think this is going to happen anytime soon, so when Intel releases of MacOS stop happening apple hardware might be the only way to virtualize MacOS for a while


Someone would have to write something that can emulate/abstract the apple iGPU to get anywhere near a usable GUI

I'm not familiar with what Apple's GPU architecture on its ARM SoCs looks like, but wouldn't a framebuffer be sufficient? Or does ARM macOS have absolutely no software rendering fallback and relies on the GPU to handle all of it?

I know that regular amd64 macOS runs fine without GPU acceleration in a VM (like what is shown here), and arm64 Windows likewise with an emulated EFI framebuffer in QEMU on an amd64 host (it's bloody slow, being 100% emulated, but it works well enough to play around with.)




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