Running Mac OS X 10.6 beta versions (10A96, 10A190) with Qemu-PPC

[Ryan]

It works!
Screenshot:

Configuration:

Code: Select all

qemu-system-ppc -drive media=disk,aio=threads,file=10A096_Clean.img,cache=unsafe -M mac99,via=pmu -m 2048

[Cat_7]

Lovely!

But you don't tell us how you did it
The 10A096_Clean.dmg disk image can be found on the macintosh garden site. Rename it to have an .img extensions and boot Qemu with the image set to be a hard disk. The aio=threads and cache=unsafe arguments are not needed.

The command line you mentioned here: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-os ... per-builds cannot be correct.
It defines a hard disk while you try to boot from a CD (with -boot d). Also, multi-threaded tgc is not available for qemu-system-ppc.

Best,
Cat_7

[adespoton]

Lovely!

But you don't tell us how you did it
The 10A096_Clean.dmg disk image can be found on the macintosh garden site. Rename it to have an .img extensions and boot Qemu with the image set to be a hard disk. The aio=threads and cache=unsafe arguments are not needed.

The command line you mentioned here: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-os ... per-builds cannot be correct.
It defines a hard disk while you try to boot from a CD (with -boot d). Also, multi-threaded tgc is not available for qemu-system-ppc.

Best,
Cat_7

I've had those images running for a few years; they use the same config I use for 10.5, which they are very similar to. I don't have them in my official list of configurations for UTM or QEMU because they're not official release versions They're a bit buggy, but not too bad.

I've been planning to take 10A190 and back-port a bunch of stuff from 10.6 proper that still has its PPC code intact to create a FrankenLeopard for a few years, but somehow never got around to it. I seem to recall there were also a few components that were unstable right through 190 that could be cleanly replaced with the equivalents from 10.5.8 - I needed to do that to get something working on my G4 Mini, but I can't remember what.

[Ryan]

It's quite a bit slow!
Ways of improving performance are:
Set anti-aliasing to lightest and set minimum to 12.
Disable Spotlight indexing (System Preferences => Spotlight => Privacy, then select all of your disks)
Disable AirPort Utility's 24/7 problem monitoring (open it, then go to the settings)

[adespoton]

It's quite a bit slow!
Ways of improving performance are:
Set anti-aliasing to lightest and set minimum to 12.
Disable Spotlight indexing (System Preferences => Spotlight => Privacy, then select all of your disks)
Disable AirPort Utility's 24/7 problem monitoring (open it, then go to the settings)

You'll also want to disable energy saver settings, especially anything to do with turning off the screen or sleeping the computer. Not much that can be done about the overall slowness though as it was built with debug symbols enabled; it's going to be much slower than an equivalent system built for production.

You can make it take up a lot less space by running Monolingual over it though -- this will allow you to strip out all localized files you don't need plus any hardware architectures you aren't using. You can also strip out *some* debug symbols using the "strip" command from terminal (assuming you've installed XCode); it won't strip global symbols, but it'll strip any local ones, which will again trim the file sizes and potentially speed up runtime slightly.