VirtualBox Beta Supports OS X As Guest OS On Macs

milesw writes "In addition to a slew of new features, VirtualBox 3.2.0 Beta 1 offers experimental support for Mac OS X guests running on Apple hardware. Got to wonder whether Larry Ellison discussed this with Steve Jobs beforehand, given Apple's refusal to allow virtualizing their (non-server) OS."

With what host?

[dingen]

Does anyone know if this works with all hosts? Can you run a virtualized Mac OS X guest on a Mac from a Windows or Linux host? Or can you just run OS X guests with an OS X host?

Re:With what host?

[MBCook]

Apple's policy has always been (as far as I know), you can virtualize OS X all you want, but you have to have Apple hardware. I thought you had to have OS X Server as the host OS, but I guess that wasn't the case.

Re:With what host?

[dingen]

The fact you can run OS X as a guest on a Mac does not imply you are actually using Mac OS X as host OS. You can use Boot Camp to run Linux or Windows as host OS on a Mac as well. My question is: can you run OS X as a guest in such a situation, or does it only work from an OS X host OS?

Re:With what host?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The other question, of course, is whether the "On Macs" requirement is technical in some serious sense(any one of the modern virtualization tricks where you pass as much as possible through to the hardware, rather than trapping it and crunching it in software emulation depending somehow on EFI, or the particular chipsets of Macs, or something of that nature), or whether it is a purely artificial constraint, that exists to keep Oracle out of range of Steve Jobs' eye lasers...

If the former, turning it into a general purpose "Virtualbox virtualizes OSX" will require some nontrivial work. If the latter, I'm assuming that there will be a third party build of VirtualBox(large swaths of which are, after all, FOSS) supporting OSX on arbitrary hosts floating around within a matter of days, or even hours.

Running it right now

[Anonymous Coward]

I currently have Snow Leopard 10.6.1 running on Ubuntu Lucid x64. USB support is a little dodgy, but it works from time to time with the iPhone SDK. Updating to the latest version currently causes kernel panics but oh well. Its running ok on my old ASUS m50. (Even works on Win7 x64 on a Phenom 9600)

Re:Shit just got real

[betterunixthanunix]

No more out of the bottle than the hackintosh community. Apple will just sue vendors who allow people to bypass the license, and all that will be left are a tiny group of committed hackers who will be small enough for Apple to ignore, hopefully. Really, most people in the free software and open source software communities are staying away from Apple because of their hostility, and businesses will not want to risk a lawsuit from Apple.