Your mileage may vary when using a Intel CPU (though we don’t expect any issues.) We encourage our readers to help contribute their experiences with Intel hosts, so this guide can be updated as appropriate.

This guide has only been tested with Ryzen CPUs.

If you need help with setting that up, refer to the The Passthrough POST Discord server.

This guide assumes that you already have set up a GPU pass-through virtual machine in the past and have experience with QEMU and libvirt, no support/steps will be given in the Hackintosh-KVM guide for setting up QEMU/libvirt for GPU pass-through, networking, CPU pinning, etc.

We encourage others in the VFIO community to join our Discord server and help us out to work out other issues in the future. We will be adding an additional guide to Hackintosh-KVM series concentrating on the q35 chipset soon, after some testing is done to ensure it works with host CPU pass-through, macOS updates, and stability in general. If you want to find q35 chipset guides, they are available elsewhere for the time being. The main reason this guide focuses on the i440fx chipset is that there are still a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out on q35 with 10 series Nvidia GPUs and host CPU pass-through, whereas i440fx works well regardless of the host system’s hardware.

We will not be using Apple’s actual OSK(SMC) key, which is an attempt to make your virtual machine a “Real Macintosh.” This information is provided for entertainment purposes only and The Passthrough POST waives all liability for any and all of what you do with it. This guide will also be setting up these VMs as “Hackintosh” systems.

In this guide we will be showing you how to create a Hackintosh-KVM virtual machine using QEMU’s i440fx chipset, with the added benefit of using host passthrough of the CPU, instead of using the Penryn emulation that tends to be the usual way to get OSX up and running. Read Also: Benchmarking Linux OGL performance with Bugle We can also enable a much better user experience for OSX virtual machines using GPU Passthrough. It’s much more simple and straightforward.įor a few years now, thanks to the hard work of others in the QEMU/KVM community, the ability to use the macOS operating system on our KVM powered virtual machines is now a reality. If you want to make an OSX VM please follow our new guide here.

Hackintosh high sierra