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SnowKitty running on VMware Workstation

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Noel_C
Noel_C
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Just out of curiosity, what kind of speed should one expect out of one of these newer setups?

 

I have an older OSX VM called "leowiz" by pcwiz and it's rather slow, even with VT emulation enabled. Slow, as in it feels like it's running on a computer from the early 1990s.

 

Are these VMs just sort of "I got it to work, woohoo!" or are the newer configs fast enough to be useful for the occasional Mac-specific operation? For example, once in a blue moon I need to make a new .dmg file. The "leowiz" VM I had is just *barely* fast enough to wade through it, and even then the simple act of copying files into the VM, making the .dmg, and copying the .dmg back out takes like 20 minutes, and these are not large files.

 

The only other (noob) question I have is this: I keep running into comments that the two phase bootstrap process must be followed - i.e., point the CD drive to snowy_darwin.iso first, then point it to the real software to run. This "leowiz" VM never needed that - it boots right into OSX 10.5 (though it takes an age). Is that kind of "press play and boot" operation simply no longer possible?

 

Thanks.

 

-Noel

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ArgVega
ArgVega
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Just out of curiosity, what kind of speed should one expect out of one of these newer setups?

 

I have an older OSX VM called "leowiz" by pcwiz and it's rather slow, even with VT emulation enabled. Slow, as in it feels like it's running on a computer from the early 1990s.

 

Are these VMs just sort of "I got it to work, woohoo!" or are the newer configs fast enough to be useful for the occasional Mac-specific operation? For example, once in a blue moon I need to make a new .dmg file. The "leowiz" VM I had is just *barely* fast enough to wade through it, and even then the simple act of copying files into the VM, making the .dmg, and copying the .dmg back out takes like 20 minutes, and these are not large files.

 

The only other (noob) question I have is this: I keep running into comments that the two phase bootstrap process must be followed - i.e., point the CD drive to snowy_darwin.iso first, then point it to the real software to run. This "leowiz" VM never needed that - it boots right into OSX 10.5 (though it takes an age). Is that kind of "press play and boot" operation simply no longer possible?

 

Thanks.

 

-Noel

 

 

Well it all depends, I'm not familiar with what the setup of the leowiz image so I don't know what you have or dont' have installed in there. It is safe to say that osx virtualization has come along way in the past year, especialy with donk and zeniths tools.

 

What i can suggest is you make sure you have the latest vmware tools, as well as the latest zeniths drivers installed. I run 10.6.3 witout vt and it runs pretty smoothly with 2 cores and 2gb of ram, but its all subjctive as what would be decent for me might not be for you. I can confirm I use safari and itunes pretty easily and the utilities as well with no crashing, sometimes a little slow but not to bad.

 

As far as booting goes, you have 2 options with mac osx:

 

Using donk's method of the darwin.iso to boot it, due to Apple's EULA, with vt-x this is supposed to run as a native mac would virualizing the hardware, but it must be booted from the cd drive.

 

Using zenith's method with a little vmx modification you get a suitable machine to run osx, this requires some extra kexts and smbios and stuff to make it seem as native as possible, the advantage here is you use a bootloader like the one you have in leowiz to boot straight from harddrive, like chameleon or pcefi.

 

 

Like I said these are all my opinions, I'm no expert in the matter but can help if you have trouble, I would advise you to check if all the drivers and vmware tools are the latest in your copy of leowiz, also check you have all appropriate vmx settings and kernel flags being used, as well as maybe give it more ram and 2 cores if not done so.

 

Good Luck. Happy Virtualizing

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meatlocker
meatlocker
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Hello, friends. Long time listener, first time caller here. I have been enjoying the virtualized SL experience for some time now on a quad core Xeon, and recently got an HP DV7T (Core i5) to repeat the install on. There were some bumps in the road initially, but I finally got it working with the i5 proc. The strange thing is...through multiple installations/configurations, I can not, for the life of me, get any 64 bit app support, even with the 32 bit kernel, once I update from 10.6.1 to either 10.6.2. or 10.6.3. I haven't the slightest idea why this is. I have tried multiple darwin.iso files...no joy. I have a snapshot of 10.6.1 (before update) that clearly shows all of the 64 bit apps in Activity Monitor. I upgrade to 10.6.3...the 64 bit tag is gone.

 

I have been searching since Friday night through multiple threads and sites for an answer...

 

Am I missing something obvious? Any help is appreciated immensely.

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ArgVega
ArgVega
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It depends Zeniths driver offers some 2D acceleration and runs pretty smooth for me. Some users have reported that Zeniths driver is unstable when resizing the window, but I use in full screen anyway so its no problem for me.

 

Zeniths driver is a work in progress so if you would like to wait for further releases, and like to resize the window while using Snow Leopard. Then I suggest using VMware Fusion 3.0 drivers that is installed in VMware tools.

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MSoK
MSoK
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It depends Zeniths driver offers some 2D acceleration and runs pretty smooth for me. Some users have reported that Zeniths driver is unstable when resizing the window, but I use in full screen anyway so its no problem for me.

 

Zeniths driver is a work in progress so if you would like to wait for further releases, and like to resize the window while using Snow Leopard. Then I suggest using VMware Fusion 3.0 drivers that is installed in VMware tools.

Nemes,

ArgVega's comments regarding Zenith432's graphics drivers are true, I also have found them pretty stable, however as a work in progress Zenith432 appears to have left the scene for the moment, so not likely to see any progress for a while.

In terms of scaling you need to use one of Donk's Darwin.iso's either wks7 or the 301 release, if you are using Zenith432's latest graphics drivers v1.2.2 then also install the guestd_patches.pkg this enables scaling, link to the url below:

 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vmsvga2/files/

 

In terms of the latest darwin.iso's (301, 302 or 310b) not sure if the graphics have improved relative to Zenith432's v1.2.2, unless anyone else knows better.

 

Please note the latest darwin.iso 310b is NOT compatible with Zenith432's graphics drivers and they need to be uninstalled, uninstall.sh available at the url link above.

MSoK.

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ArgVega
ArgVega
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Nemes,

ArgVega's comments regarding Zenith432's graphics drivers are true, I also have found them pretty stable, however as a work in progress Zenith432 appears to have left the scene for the moment, so not likely to see any progress for a while.

In terms of scaling you need to use one of Donk's Darwin.iso's either wks7 or the 301 release, if you are using Zenith432's latest graphics drivers v1.2.2 then also install the guestd_patches.pkg this enables scaling, link to the url below:

 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vmsvga2/files/

 

In terms of the latest darwin.iso's (301, 302 or 310b) not sure if the graphics have improved relative to Zenith432's v1.2.2, unless anyone else knows better.

 

Please note the latest darwin.iso 310b is NOT compatible with Zenith432's graphics drivers and they need to be uninstalled, uninstall.sh available at the url link above.

MSoK.

 

Well sumed up man. I had no idea 310b wasn't compatible, but I guess I should have put 2 and 2 together since it came later.

 

 

Also Zenith has been gone for a while, forgot to mention that. His last release was late last year of his 1.2.2 driver. Its a shame because I was looking forward to QE/CI :rolleyes: . But yeah hopefully he comes back and continues to make his progress on his driver.

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yeehaw123
yeehaw123
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Thanks for the guide Zenith!

 

I am now running Snow Leopard 10.6.3 flawlessly on my i5-430m. Only sound is quite stuttery, so music has to be played in Windows but that's no problem.

 

If someone managed to make an QE/QI graphics driver it would be perfect ;)

 

I can develop iPhone Apps now :-)

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MSoK
MSoK
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Thanks for the guide Zenith!

 

I am now running Snow Leopard 10.6.3 flawlessly on my i5-430m. Only sound is quite stuttery, so music has to be played in Windows but that's no problem.

 

If someone managed to make an QE/QI graphics driver it would be perfect :D

 

I can develop iPhone Apps now :-)

Have you tried Zenith432's sound driver EnsoniqAudioPCI_1.0.2 link below, works pretty well, but not doing anything too fancy!

 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vmsvga2/files/

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MSoK
MSoK
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Yes I installed the Ac97 codec + the patch and it didn't change much.

 

Thanks anyway :)

No problem, final thought, in Audio MIDI Setup, under Audio Output have you tried altering the Format between 44100.0 Hz and 48000.0 Hz, this has helped in some cases.

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tackle
tackle
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To those of you that have SL running as guest in Windows 7 host:

 

Can you detect Bonjour shared network devices within SL? I'm thinking about trying this (currently running SL host and Win 7 guest) since I spend 95% time in Windows, only using SL for Mail, Calendar and network access (whole network is Mac based).

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Jarenp
Jarenp
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I followed tour instructions and installed SL on a Linux host with a core 2 duo without VT technology. I got it up and running ok and last night installed the 10.6.4 update. After the update my vmwould no longer boot. It would reach the point where it says Now Booting Darwin and then I'd get an error window from vmware stating that the CPU had been shut down.

 

I pled around a bit and eventually noticed that my Mach_kernel was now quite a bit bigger and was last updated in April. Just to see if I could get up and running I copied over the version from the vmsl archive. I was suprised that the system did boot and seems to be running fine again. I imagine that this way I don't have a true 10.6.4 install though.

 

Does a similarly patched version of this new kernel exist so that I can gain whatever new stuff was added to the kernel in any of the updates?

 

Does it even matter?

 

Thanks,

 

Jaren

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Zenith432
Zenith432
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Does a similarly patched version of this new kernel exist so that I can gain whatever new stuff was added to the kernel in any of the updates?

This post has a link to the current mach_kernel I'm using. It's based on 10.6.4, and has the same patches as the original one. It's a dual-arch kernel, and the x86_64 version will boot by default. If you need the i386 version, you have to use a boot parameter for pcefi (arch=i386 or -x32).

 

 

Does it even matter?
I'm not sure. The one found in vmsl is based on 10.6 (do uname -a from Terminal to find out.)
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Donk
Donk
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This is the current mach_kernel I'm using. It's based on 10.6.3, and has the same patches as the one in vmsl. It's a dual-arch kernel, and the x86_64 version will boot by default. If you need the i386 version, you have to use a boot parameter for pcefi (arch=i386 or -x32).

 

 

I'm not sure. The one found in vmsl is based on 10.6 (do uname -a from Terminal to find out.)

 

Zenith432 I lost the patch to the boot loader you sent me last year. Any chance you could PM it to me please? Have an issue with TSC related code, and pretty sure you had some code for that.

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Zenith432
Zenith432
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Update

 

I've built a 10.6.8 kernel (Darwin 10.8) with the patches discussed in this topic. The fixes are

 

  • Modify tsc_init() to use TSC frequency values calculated by Chameleon/PCEFI.
  • Fix lapic_init() not to panic if LAPIC version < 0x14.
  • Fix possible deadlock in time_cswitch() when TSC is erratic inside virtual machine.

[Note: the kernel is dual-arch x86_64/i386]

 

Link to binary (in vmsl/mach_kernel) and source diff for the patches (file ending in diff.txt under vmsl).

 

Edit (6/27/2011): Update to Darwin 10.8. The 10.7 kernel can be found here.

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Jarenp
Jarenp
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Update

 

I've built a 10.6.4 kernel (Darwin 10.4) with the patches discussed in this topic. The fixes are

 

Thanks Zenith!

I tried out the 10.6.3 version you linked yesterday and it worked fine for me. I'll check this one out tonight.

 

 

You mentioned higher up in this topic that you were initially using ps2 mouse support but now you just use usb mouse support. I currently have a usb mouse and keyboard connected to my host machine. The only way I have been able to get the mouse to work correctly is to enable virtual usb mouse support, add a usb controller to my vm and then click the button to disconnect the mouse from host and connect to guest. This process is a lot more cumbersome than it seems like it should be.

 

Should I be able to get the mouse to work correctly simply by dragging it over vmware and clicking into the guest? When I do this now the cursor changes to the mac cursor, but regardless of where I click the guest reacts as if I clicked in the top left corner of the vm.

 

Would using the mouse in ps2 mode help solve this issue? I've got the kexts installed that came with vmsl but am unsure how to configure the host and guest to try out ps2 mouse.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Zenith432
Zenith432
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You mentioned higher up in this topic that you were initially using ps2 mouse support but now you just use usb mouse support.
I don't know where you got that idea, I use ps/2 mouse+keyboard.

 

Should I be able to get the mouse to work correctly simply by dragging it over vmware and clicking into the guest? When I do this now the cursor changes to the mac cursor, but regardless of where I click the guest reacts as if I clicked in the top left corner of the vm.
That's what happens if you use virtual USB with guestos = "freebsd...". If used with guestos darwin, virtual USB works fine. ps/2 mode works with both freebsd & darwin.

 

Would using the mouse in ps2 mode help solve this issue? I've got the kexts installed that came with vmsl but am unsure how to configure the host and guest to try out ps2 mouse.
In the VMX file set

mouse.vusb.enable = "FALSE"
keyboard.vusb.enable = "FALSE"

On the guest side, you need to have the following kexts installed (both found in vmsl)

AppleACPIPS2Nub.kext
ApplePS2Controller.kext

or you can also install VoodooPS2Controller.kext instead of ApplePS2Controller.kext.

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