Mac virtual machine software for Mac guests.

[jamie marchant]

Hi: 

 I have a couple of Mac OS and PowerPC Linux distors I am not currently using. Is there a way I can run these are guest OSs(like you do with virtualisation on the PC)? Are PowerPC machines too slow for this? 

 

[Gorgonops]

If you're willing to run Linux as your host OS there are several options. (MoL, MoL+KVM, QEMU+KVM.) I don't know of any OS X based virtualizer for PPC.

 

[jamie marchant]

I am not interesting in running Linux as the host OS. 

 

[galgot]

There is Mac-on-Mac :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac-on-Mac

https://sourceforge.net/projects/maconmac/

Never tried it tho...

 

[jamie marchant]

I tried that but could not get it to work since it does not work on X.5 or X.4. 

 

[Gorgonops]

Then I suspect you're out of luck. There's Sheepshaver if you want to count it, but of course it only runs old versions of MacOS.

You could also probably compile QEMU without KVM support to run a PowerPC "guest", but it'll use emulation instead of virtualization so it'll be monstrously slow.

 

[jamie marchant]

Sheepshaver only runs classic AFIK. 

 

[blitter]

AFAIK the PowerPC chips used in Macs don't include virtualization extensions similar to those in x86 chips that virtualization software like QEMU or KVM takes advantage of, so unless you use something like Mac-on-Linux on a Linux host (which appears to be a special case) you're limited to emulation. Use of virtual machines was just starting to take off as PPC was phased out.

 

[jamie marchant]

If your right that would explain why I can't find any. 

 

[Gorgonops]

AFAIK the PowerPC chips used in Macs don't include virtualization extensions similar to those in x86 chips that virtualization software like QEMU or KVM takes advantage of

That is *not* true. PowerPC doesn't need any special "virtualization extensions" because the PowerPC ISA has always been fully compliant with Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements and doesn't need any "help", unlike i386. (Programs like VMware managed "virtualization" on x86 before AMD-V/Intel VT-x only via some pretty wasteful workarounds.) There are working virtual machine programs for PowerPC (such as the aforementioned MoL and KVM for Linux), there just don't happen to be any written for OS X because, let's face it, Mac users didn't really have much use for them. There are people running OS X and Linux guests on top of KVM on both Macs and oddball other PowerPC architectures (IE, Amiga X1000s), you just can't use OS X as the host.

 

[jamie marchant]

It looks like some of these emulators also run on x86, if I wanted to experiment with these OS on a PC. (though emulation will never run the same as real hardware.) 

 

[blitter]

(such as the aforementioned MoL and KVM for Linux)

KVM works under Linux on a PPC Mac? TIL.

 

[Gorgonops]

KVM works under Linux on a PPC Mac? TIL.

It was news to me until fairly recently. It sort of makes me want to install Linux on one of the Powerbooks I haven't had the motivation to get rid of and try it just to say I did.

 

[jamie marchant]

Is 'The Classic Environment' a virtual machine?