Page 1 of 1

[macOS] QEMU build using Hypervisor framework

Posted: Wed Apr 10, 2019 5:20 pm
by mePy2
Hello everyone. It’s been a while since I last write here...
(I received no email, I suppose no one posted a reply in any old threads I participated to)

As you know I’m not a macOS programmer but I found this – did no research at all – : https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor

What are your thoughts about it?

Best

Re: [macOS] QEMU build using Hypervisor framework

Posted: Wed Apr 10, 2019 7:11 pm
by adespoton
I've only found one product so far that uses the Apple Hypervisor framework; it's a little light-weight for most virtualization solutions.

For QEMU, the hypervisor would be a replacement for KVM (it's essentially the Apple equivalent), which would only be useful for qemu-x86, to shunt some of the load from QEMU to bare metal.

As far as I know, nobody's tried to integrate the framework into libvirt, which is what would need to be done to accomplish this.

As for qemu-ppc, there's not much overlap here. qemu-ppc needs to provide its own OpenBIOS architecture, its own emulated hardware, and its own emulated processor. There's not much left (other than possibly the GPU?) to pass through to the host.

Re: [macOS] QEMU build using Hypervisor framework

Posted: Wed Apr 10, 2019 7:14 pm
by mePy2
Hi,

I tried this: http://breakintheweb.com/2017/10/14/Qem ... Framework/ I do not know how good is doing, even if it actually utilize that framework. I’m on Debian and everything is just normal. As glitchy as on VirtualBox.

Best

Re: [macOS] QEMU build using Hypervisor framework

Posted: Wed Apr 10, 2019 7:35 pm
by adespoton
Yeah; using qemu-kvm (or qemu-hypervisor.framework) is essentially like using a lite version of VirtualBox; VB just provides an interface on top of qemu-x86/x86-64 and its own multi-layer virtualization stack. hypervisor.framework is faster than VB's implementation, more secure, but much less capable. And it exposes relatively the same glitches, which are mostly due to chipset implementaiton of virtualization and not the method used to call those features.

But we should probably move this discussion out of the qemu-ppc discussion board, as it's not related, unless someone finds a way to use it for GPU virtualization.

Re: [macOS] QEMU build using Hypervisor framework

Posted: Wed Apr 10, 2019 7:54 pm
by mePy2
Yeah... maybe in General etc.