This Linux PC Runs macOS Faster Than a Real Mac

i know what you're thinking ah it's time for another hackintosh video no no that that's not a hackintosh but it is running mac os extremely well i might add our cinebench cpu compute score on this machine in mac os is four times faster than the highest end mac pro but like i said it isn't a hackintosh in fact it's just running mac os as a cute little side gig this computer is a whole lot more every time i do a hackintosh build i have to do a disclaimer that goes something along these lines prior to building macintosh consult your doctor expect to have some compatibility issues with your hardware difficulty getting every feature to work like handoff airdrop imessage etc problems with fine future system updates broken hardware acceleration features dual booting from the same ssd stable and hot plugging of usb and thunderbolt devices any thunderbolt support whatsoever your computer may also have better thermals than a real map which may be considered undesirable you may have the instant urge to scrap macos and stick to windows instead you'll find yourself googling tutorials on how to turn your ipad pro into a tennis racket and to begin to consider the apple pippin the best product ever made etc and because of that today it's a little different we're putting down the hackintosh tools and running mac os in a virtual machine now a virtual machine is exactly what it sounds like a program that runs an operating system in this case mac os on a host operating system on your computer in this case linux and it does it virtually now there are a lot of benefits that come from running mac os in a virtual machine environment for one install can be as easy or as difficult as you want number two the fact that it's effectively just a program means that if anything in mac os breaks it's generally not going to mess up your host linux volume system number three backups are extremely easy in fact you can clone your macos virtual machine as often as you'd like and so you don't have to worry about mac os updates breaking your computer like you do with hackintosh make a backup try updating and if it breaks well just go back to your previous virtual machine and try again all of these things sound awesome right well as with all things this method doesn't come without a few gotchas and we'll talk about those in a minute but first i need to tackle the many installation methods okay let's talk host os first really just about any linux distro will work great there are some that are a little more user-friendly than others some that are more popular but i've found that mac os performance seems to be the best on arch-based distros now arch is a little bit of a meme inside of the linux community because it's a little tricky to install for beginners there's no graphical user interface so for that purpose i won't be recommending it instead manjaro is a fantastic and friendly linux distribution that's based on arch and there are a lot of versions of manjaro that use different desktop environments and for linux novices a desktop environment is basically what the gui looks like it kind of dictates how the os feels i find that kde plasma seems to be the most user friendly with a customizable layout lots of easy access to settings menus and really good access to themes widgets and more it's awesome once you've got your linux distro installed you'll need to make sure that your hardware is ready to support virtualization now any intel cpu after about ivy bridge and any amd ryzen or threadripper cpu will work just great but you'll need to make sure that virtualization is enabled in your motherboard's bios on intel you'll find it listed as vtd and it's typically enabled by default now on amd chipsets you'll likely need to turn on amd v you'll probably find this setting in the processor submenu but you may also find it in the chipset advanced cpu configuration or another sub menu perfect okay now we're ready to get to mac os reality is there are a lot of different mac os vm projects from several different development teams but they all share something in common they all use qmu an open source emulator which operates entirely in software obviously this is not ideal from a performance standpoint so a linux kernel module named kvm is utilized as an accelerator so that physical cpu virtualization can be performed i've tried more than five of the most popular macos virtualization projects and i've concluded that there are really only two that are worth trying the first is sosumi which is a snap package what's a snap package you ask well snaps are essentially universal linux packages that work on just about any distro installing suzumi is really simple open your command line type sudo snap install so sue me and that's it your vm should start up in mac os recovery and all you need to do is format the disk susume created in disk utility reinstall mac os and then once finished well your computer will boot into the clover bootloader menu and you can simply select boot mac os from susumi you're done you're running mac os as you can see we can open safari we can browse the web download apps from the app store etc it works but here's the problem if i open up cinebench here you'll see that for a 64 core thread purper holy crap this is abysmal performance by default this vm will only launch with two gigs of memory and two cores from whatever your system has available there's no sound pass through networking only and no pcie passed through through your gpu not ideal now there is a launch script within your home folder that you can modify to change some of these values but if you're really going to go that far you ought to just go big and install mac os simple kvm the best way to virtualize mac os on linux and the work on which sosumi is based mac os simple kvm gets far more frequent updates it has a lot more user controllable variables and just a lot more so let's install it the process okay i gotta be honest it's a little more involved with us having to ensure that qmu python3 pip and kvm modules are already installed i'll leave more detailed instructions in the link below from distro to distro because it will vary but once you've got those things installed we will then need to run the jumpstart script which will actually pull the mac os installation files directly from apple servers now by default it'll snag catalina i suspect in the next few months it'll snag big sur but you can also manually define another os if you'd like once completed we need to create a virtual disk on which we can install the operating system that we just downloaded while we can manually change this later on it's best to choose the right size right from the get go we're going to do 300 gigs once that's done we'll need to edit basic basic.sh which is the script that we're going to run each time we want to launch our virtual machine or really what it does is it tells the vm where all of our hardware is located and so we need to tell it where the virtual hard drive that we just created is located and the properties that are associated with it by appending a few lines of code to the end and for now that's it we can now launch the vm by executing on the basic.sh script you'll see your screen boot into the clover boot manager something you're likely familiar with if you've ever built a hackintosh before and then we select install mac os then well you'd do what you'd do if you had a real mac open up disk utility and format the largest drive to whatever you want your macintosh hard drive volume to be called now there are a couple other discs in there don't touch those they're necessary but shouldn't be tampered with by us then we go to reinstall mac os and boom mac os installs now this can take a while so be patient especially based on the age of your computer because we haven't allocated a number of cores yet and so it might be slow your computer also might reboot a couple of times but you should eventually find yourself in the mac os's onboarding process set it up just as you would any mac and voila it's up but here's the thing just like sosumi performance is going to be pretty weak because we haven't performed any adjustments to memory allocation the number of cpu cores and threads that the vm can use the screen resolution and any pass-through hardware for devices like gpus and sound cards so how do we go about doing all of that well luckily the mac os simple kvm's github has some really easy to follow tutorials if you're interested but because i don't want to bore you with all of that stuff let's just skip to the good part performance now as you may recall from a prior video we are running a 3990x 64 core threadripper processor this thing is an absolute charger at over ten thousand dollars and when compared to a mac pro head to head it clobbered the aluminum space heater in performance but that was a level playing field with both computers running supported operating systems the question now is can our linux machine running a mac os vm beat a mac pro at its own game running natively going into the startup script we've set our computer to allocate nearly all of its cpu and memory resources to the virtual machine and i start to feel pretty freaking optimistic because mac os boots up in a matter of seconds we open cinebench and press run okay this thing is fast so fast that it's nearly four times quicker than a comparably priced mac pro and remember we're running two operating systems simultaneously how much of a system's resources hit does it take to run mac os in a vm you're wondering so very little we're talking a 10 performance difference virtualized in mac os compared to natively running in windows that is fantastic well what about gpu performance well when we perform the proper pass-throughs which is a little tricky we also see performance close to bare metal okay this still isn't a genuine mac in your experience it's going to reflect that on the plus side a mac os vm in most instances is way easier to set up than a bootable dedicated hackintosh furthermore i quickly got imessage working in fact i didn't have to do anything for imessage and quickly got airdrop handoff and other wi-fi based services working great and that's something that's sometimes really tricky to get working on a real hackintosh dependent on your hardware conversely a few things that pretty much work by default on a hackintosh like usb frequently need to be configured to pass through using mac os simple kvm also given this is a virtualized environment as we mentioned you can expect anywhere from a 10 to a 20 performance drop over natively running the operating system now that's bub kiss on a system like this but on your average computer you'll probably notice that all in all i think this is a fantastic solution for people who may want or need to use mac os occasionally but if you anticipate running mac os full time i still think you'd be better off building a hackintosh or you know frankly just buying a mac but wait don't do that because our macs are on the horizon and we'll be covering them top to bottom so make sure that you're subscribed and enable notifications so you won't miss it well folks if you enjoyed this video please give it a like if you didn't send it to somebody you don't like and most importantly as always stay snazzy

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 539,176

Rating: 4.9229236 out of 5

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, hackintosh, linux, vm, macos kvm, kvm, virtualization, virtual machine, macos, big sur, catalina, manjaro, distro, debian, ubuntu, gpu passthrough, passthrough, gpu, gaming, linux gaming, macos gaming, mac pro, apple silicon, value, best mac, best pc, best computer, mac 2020, imac 2020, macbook air, macbook pro, virtual, pc, pc build

Id: -Otg7JFMuVw

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020