One of my pandemic projects that's ongoing is putting a 5x86 PC compatibility card and a "Radius Rocket" 68040 card (basically a Quadra 900 on a Nubus card) into a first-gen PowerPC Macintosh, so that I can have each running their era appropriate OSes in parallel and communicating with each other over IPX networking... to play DOOM II against one another all at the same time.
I'd hoped it would be a nice little stress-release valve from startup CEOing occasionally, but you really get an appreciation for how much more flexible, interoperable, and stable modern computers are. The old hardware and software is incredibly fiddly, though to be fair PC compatibility cards and Radius Rockets are themselves magnificent hacks for the most part, so it's not all that surprising that they're fiddly. That said, while just differently stressful, it's still fun and rewarding when some piece of the pie fits in place.
Oh man Bolo. My dad was an elementary school principal and I had a birthday party at the computer lab so my friends and I could play bolo on the Mac LCs in the lab.
So much fun. Going to have to bust out Sheepshaver.
I had celebrated one of my birthdays when I was at high school in an internet café. 4 hours of multiplayer Age of Empires 2, all paid for by my parents. That was the dream right there :)
It feels like I only recently stopped hearing the rocket launcher and the alien chatter in daily life and in dreams. It was probably 20 years ago I last played it.
Something I’ve been really curious about: Crystal Quest responsiveness.
I remember specifically feeling like it had an extremely low mouse to pixel delay, possibly even better than current computers, but I have no idea whether that’s romanticizing.
The tools exist now to objectively measure it on those macs if you’re up for that sort of thing.
I bootcamped Windows 10 onto my 2017 i5 iMac the other day so I could play some games.
Windows boots faster, feels faster, and benchmarked GPU and CPU considerably faster than macOS on the exact same hardware.
Not ground breaking news, but I do wish Apple had worked on optimising macOS for older hardware more. They claim they do or did, but I never noticed this in the later mountain named versions.
All a moot point now with Apple Silicon being the furture! :)
> I do wish Apple had worked on optimising macOS for older hardware more
I didn't enjoy seeing my Intel macs get perceptually slower and slower with each release, and I'd be very afraid of how unoptimized the MacOS can get now, with a performance headroom Apple bought themselves with M1 :/.
Meanwhile my 2014-era Haswell gaming PC with an old 500 MB/s SATA SSD boots Windows 10 in a few seconds (about 4-5 times faster than my M1 Air).
> Windows boots faster, feels faster, and benchmarked GPU and CPU considerably faster than macOS on the exact same hardware.
I put Windows 10 on my old MacBook Pro and was shocked by how much more responsive it felt in Windows than in macOS. I thought the hardware was just too old because it was starting to feel sluggish in macOS, but Windows runs perfectly well on it.
Maybe Apple can continue to evolve their hardware fast enough that their software doesn’t need to be as efficient, but share your feelings that we’d all be better off if Apple had made responsiveness a priority.
It would be more fair to compare a brand new Windows installation vs a brand new macOS installation. New installations of macOS and Windows always run significantly faster than older installations, in my experience (heck, even new installations of iOS run faster).
Windows 10 does boot faster and launches apps faster than Mac OS, on the same hardware. However Mac apps are just as or more responsive and better at running in the background once they've launched. This is my experience.
Wait until you try Haiku on the same hardware. I’ve got a 4K video editor with no HW acceleration yet is smoother to edit videos than both OSX and Win10.
They build in animation delays so that the experience of using the fastest computer and the slowest computer is the same.
Take for example moving one virtual desktop to the right with control-rightarrow. It’s slow AF compared to Windows or Linux with animations off. macOS also does vsync because they never ever want visual tearing in the UI. That slows you down again. Windows does not care if you set it to look like speedy sh## and will tear all day. It’s like a dune buggy, it’ll let you do whatever and if you lose an arm it’s your own fault.
macOS is a limo with your grandparents driving. “Can I open the sunroof?” “No, it might rain” “Can I watch TV?” “No, you’ll get carsick” “....” “Stop playing with the window control!”
> continue to evolve their hardware fast enough that their software doesn’t need to be as efficient
Sorry to tell you this, but that road doesn’t go there.
Current hardware could run 10.0 like lightning.
As hardware improves, software rises to meet it. Maybe it’s because they can spend less effort on optimizing, or maybe it’s to add new features (like automatically running your photos through ML is the background, or continuously indexing the contents of every file in your entire hard drive), or maybe it’s because they want to add more layers of control (the protections around video playback), or maybe new layers of abstraction such as API calls instead of direct access to the hardware.
Whatever it is, we’ve seen the trends across every tech and almost every company for at least the past 30 years.
This is true. Most of these comparisons are between a well-used system with a brand-new one. “Of course Firefox feels snappier than Chrome, you haven’t installed your 20 extensions yet.” A so on.
I do wonder if they stopped optimizing for Intel once it was clear they were going to release apple CPU based Macs. I don’t have one personally, but I’ve tested a family member’s M1 MacBook Air, and it’s the most responsive laptop I’ve ever used. My 2019 MacBook Pro, on the other hand, feels... Just fine. And GPU performance for sure is far better under bootcamp. I pretty much exclusively play games in bootcamp, even if there’s a Mac version.
I don't think there's that many places in MacOS where they write hand optimised assembly for either architecture. Looking at rust it seems like LLVM is optimising a lot of languages (specially that apple uses). This is platform independent.
The M1 is supposedly really fast, but it's not like they optimise userspace for either architecture.
Booting is different on the M1, but once the kernel is alive and well it's just RISC vs CISC.
Sure, but those are usually written in a compiled language that LLVM will pass over anyways, generating optimised code.
My point is that this all "mac is optimised for the hardware" "nonsense" is very non-techy. Sure they don't need to worry about drivers the same way, but it's still x86 or arm, people already target these so it's just about whose code and architecture is the better.
Interesting. Just yesterday, I installed Windows on my son’s i7 iMac as there were several Windows-only apps he wanted to use. Several times he asked “why is this so slow?” I didn’t run any benchmarks yet, but the boot was perceptibly slower and the system felt less responsive, Win 10 vs Catalina.
There are oddities with windows on a mac that make it seem like an overall worse experience. The trackpad driver apple supplies is sub par, there is no way to enable tap to click that I can tell at all (much to my chagrin as the artificial trackpad clicking on new macs gives me wrist strain due to having to smush your finger on a flat unmoving piece of glass). Mouse control on windows is also terrible. You set your scroll on a mouse to something like 4 lines or whatever, anything so you aren't just wheeling the thing out trying to get down the page, then you unplug the mouse and the settings carry over to the trackpad and it scrolls at lightspeed. I think in general windows is simply a poorer OS from a ux standpoint too, and the regular users have gotten used to this terrible experience. There is a lot of perceptual lag and hiccups just navigating the system, even on a beefy workstation with 4 cores >3.0ghz each which makes no sense to me. It makes no sense why windows explorer should even have delays. Why the start menu should have a delay. Not sure how regular windows power users tolerate this OS. It's as clunky as I remember XP being despite the hardware I'm trying these days being way more powerful; 20 years and no ux experience because microsoft knows people and companies will buy it anyway. Software seems in general to be slow to start, and slow to stop, in contrast to mac os, which must strive to be a better user experience if it is to poach customers from microsoft at all.
That being said, take a game that's been ported to both systems and run your mac in bootcamp with windows, and its not uncommon to pick up a good 10-20fps at least on games. I'm sure enterprise software especially the adobe suite runs a lot better on macos, because there was more engineering effort optimizing this port. I remember TF2 was most sriking on my 2012 macbook pro. On the mac OS side I was getting like 30-40fps on medium settings. Decent, I guess, for an ancient game. On windows in contrast, I was pushing 90fps, and it looked a lot better. That was the case for every single game I've tried.
The hardware drivers for things like CPU, GPU, the meat of the system, are much better on windows because the manufacturers just spend more effort building better drivers for this far larger market. Apple specific-sourced hardware that isn't an intel chip or some discrete GPU, like the trackpad experience, the display experience, how the fan is calibrated, are all subpar entirely on windows because Apple doesn't care to improve the bootcamp drivers. They are known to be supar, and on some Macs, the community even recommends their own drivers to use instead of the bootcamp ones, because Apple doens't care about the bootcamp experience.
> It makes no sense why windows explorer should even have delays. Why the start menu should have a delay. Not sure how regular windows power users tolerate this OS. It's as clunky as I remember XP being despite the hardware I'm trying these days being way more powerful; 20 years and no ux experience because microsoft knows people and companies will buy it anyway.
I use Windows for work everyday. I don't like it as much as Linux or osx but I can't say that I have issues you are describing with start menu lag or windows explorer. And that's with several phpstorm/pycharm instances open along with like a dozen services running in docker.
There are many problems with windows, but I don't think performance is one of them. Also it was a very long time ago, but XP was one of my favorite OS's. I think that was the last time where I could look at my process list and tell you exactly what each process is for.
Those lags are exactly what we experienced. Click on start menu, get a blue spinner. Folder in explorer? Same. Click on the settings panel, get a spinner. And not for 100ms, but for a second or more. Now, this was on a fresh install, so maybe some cache needed to be built, but it was maddening.
We did it in part to benchmark some games which I do suspect will work better in Windows.
Most importantly GPU drivers. Run dxdiag.exe, Display tab, it should say DirectDraw and Direct3D acceleration are both Enabled. For that particular iMac you need two of these drivers, because two GPUs.
Another possible thing is SATA driver. Normally installed automatically as a part of Windows, but I never tried running windows on Apple desktops. If Apple gives you Windows drivers install them, otherwise install CPU-Z, “Mainboard” tab, see the chipset, then install from intel.com.
I couldn't wait for this evening so poked around during lunch. dxdiag was fine, but the SATA driver was a generic AHCI SATA driver. Replacing that with a chipset-specific SATA driver dramatically improved the responsiveness of Explorer and general application launching.
I can't be 100% sure that solved everything, but it is perceptibly faster now. I'm not sure why Windows didn't auto-install those drivers. Perhaps it would have eventually done so during one of the Windows Update cycles, but your advice was very helpful, so thank you!
Even on an ancient computer once I turn off menu and window animation the start menu and small folders open with 0 spinning and probably less than 20ms.
Maybe your “fresh install” has a bunch of bloatware and virus scanners?
Son is trying to do gaming in Minecraft with consistent 60+ fps and screen recording in OBS. (The combination of those two was hard to achieve on the Mac and so we're trying Windows as the base OS. The Mac would do 120+ fps until launching OBS, then would struggle to do better than 30 fps.)
> I'm sure enterprise software especially the adobe suite runs a lot better on macos, because there was more engineering effort optimizing this port.
The very first version of Photoshop was written on Macintosh and then later ported to Windows. But it would be interesting to know what the lineage of the code of the current version of Photoshop is. How much of it was written on OS X and macOS, and then ported to Windows, and how much is written on Windows and then ported to macOS.
I wish I got to browse the version control histories of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator some day. And also to talk with people who wrote these programs and hear them tell about it.
Trackpad options are in the bootcamp preferences IIRC, not the integrated into the windows control panel options
Bootcamp preferences are accessible from the notification tray icon and the old style control panel (availability of which depending on which windows 10 build you’re using IIRC)
Interestingly the only time the fans run up on my Mac Min is when I boot into Windows and run an update. I suspect the Mac is better at throttling to keep it quiet.
>I do wish Apple had worked on optimising macOS for older hardware more. They claim they do or did, but I never noticed this in the later mountain named versions.
Well, they did several things.
One of those was compressed memory at the OS level.
Another was a new, more optimized for SSDs, filesystem.
Anyone have recommendations on virtualizing windows for gaming? I'd like to keep my main desktop linux. Nvidia recently whitelisted direct gpu access, but I've been given conflicting advice as to esxi, virt manager, proxmox, etc. Surely this is a solved problem by now?
I do this with QEMU/KVM with passthrough of an RTX 3090, an NVME SSD, and one of the onboard USB controllers. Works like a charm, though the VM boot time is very high if you allocate a lot of RAM to it (there's some kind of bottleneck in the linux kernel when pinning huge amounts of consecutive memory pages while using passthrough, don't fully understand it but it's a known problem).
Performance is indistinguishable from native, e.g. I can easily drive the screen at the max 144 Hz refresh rate, G-sync works, etc. I did put some effort in figuring out how to pin CPU threads to cores, optimize for the CPU core topology so Windows only gets cores on the same CCX (it's an AMD Zen 3, before that it was Zen 2), etc. But all of this is documented in many places.
Do note that depending on your motherboard not all of this is possible if the chipset & BIOS do not provide enough MMIO isolation, you might not be able to isolate a USB controller or a separate NVME drive, or you might get only half the PCIe lanes for the passthrough GPU if you need to use the other full-lane slot for something like a second GPU.
The main problem would be to have to maintain the myriad of known working configurations, since they are all different depending on motherboard, BIOS, GPU, CPU, etc. If you are careful about picking the right parts (and assembling them properly), it's actually really easy to configure on any recent Linux distro, you can just click together the VM using virt-manager if you don't need anything special.
I know I had to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work though, my X470 motherboard didn't isolate the USB controller without a BIOS update for example, and after that the USB controller exhibited USB FLR (function level reset) problems causing it to hang the VM. This required blacklisting it's PCI ID from the Linux kernel and patching the kernel to disable FLR (fortunately these changes were later merged into the mainline kernel). I also had problems with the second GPU, if I plugged it into any slot other than the bottom x1 slot, the motherboard BIOS would reshuffle the IOMMU groups making it impossible to pass through the NVME and USB controller, or (if I put it in the second x16 slot) it would halve the PCIe bandwidth to the RTX3080.
All in all it took me the better part of a weekend to get everything working, but if I had to do it again from scratch and did some research into (in particular) the motherboard and BIOS, I would be able to set it everything up again in less than an hour.
I was so disappointed that there is no such thing available that its just plug-and-go. It really feels like this setup is breaking ground for some reason.
You need to have have a computer with integrated graphics / 2 graphics cards, and so can use a discrete card as a passthrough. Check out https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/
As of a few days ago, that info is outdated even for us consumers ;-)
Technically one GPU will do, but it needs vGPU support to pass through slices of the GPU to the VM - which usually means expensive data center grade GPU (e.g. Tesla), because that feature is artificially limited by the driver.
However, there is some pretty awesome, cutting edge work done in that regard: Some great people very recently released a method for unlocking the vGPU stuff on consumer grade nVidia GPUs. When that was posted on HN[0], it only supported some 10xx GPUs; but with a merge from only 13h ago, most {9,10,20,30}xx should now work.
You don’t. Pass through to a VM on ProxMox works fine without integrated graphics and a single GPU. The graphics card simply drops the physical host console after the VM begins to boot, and then displays whatever the VM is outputting.
You're right, you can do passthrough with a single GPU, and there are multiple ways to do that. But note a huge caveat: you can't run an X server, whereas being able to simultaneously run desktop apps in the host and VM is a huge reason many run Windows in a VM rather than dual-boot into it.
If you're okay with dropping vendor-unique features (e.g.: RTX) then I've found VMware's GPU virtualization to be very good, at least in my testing of Windows-on-Windows via VMware Workstation. Looks like Workstation 16 added DX11 support on Linux hosts, too.
Just make sure you go into fullscreen + (what they call) "exclusive mode", and maybe even increase the VM's priority when input is grabbed. That fixed any microstutters I had on my older CPU.
Although they're different use cases, I'm not sure if virtualizing would be the right choice for performance issues; I've successfully run audio+MIDI software under WINE using PlayOnLinux [0] which sort of [1] sandboxes each program into a virtual drive image therefore leaving untouched your ~/.wine directory, also allowing the use of different WINE versions for each program installed if needed. I also attempted to use virtualized Windows for MIDI software but the results were disappointing: although the software worked, it was unusable due to buffer underruns everywhere and huge latencies compared to either plain WINE or PlayOnLinux.
1: It isolates the Windows program to a certain point, but I have no idea if it's technically a sandbox built for security which would protect the system against a Windows program willing to do any damage to or data exfiltration from the home directory.
I do this with ProxMox and a passed through AMD RX580 and it's working fine, but the disk performance is terrible, even worse than I'd expect for the hard drive it's on. Luckily that doesn't matter much for gaming.
The Proxmox wiki has great resources on GPU passthrough, but you may have to install a kernel mod for the AMD gpu not to take the host down when the guest powers off.
I haven't been able to do this with VMware ESXi (I've tried); I forgot if it worked in unRaid or not (But it should, in theory).
Take a look at the Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel. They have multiple videos about virtualizing Windows and passing GPUs to the VMs. IIRC they’ve used and benchmarked this setup for gaming and video editing. Quick search brought up the one for video editing[1]
Do macOS guests also work on macOS hosts in QEMU/KVM?
(e.g. run 10.12 Sierra inside qemu on a 10.14 Mojave host)
if True: any Link to a tutorial?
What about performance? Is it enough performant to run GUI Apps?
(I have tried Virtual Box but found it too slow for real work)
I'm not sure you'll get the features of Virtualbox if needing GUI but there is Hypervisor.framework[1]
based upon xhyve[2]. It's what powers Docker Desktop on Mac.
You can build linux images with linux kit[3]
I make TXR releases on an i5 machine. It simultaneusly runs two GNU/Linuxes, 32 and 64 bit, Mac OS, Solaris 10 and Windows. The Android build is done on a Google Pixel 4a phone which blows away the i5 in compiling.
> The Android build is done on a Google Pixel 4a phone which blows away the i5 in compiling.
You do the actual compile on the phone? Are you using termux or a chroot or something?
Also, when you say Solaris 10 - Oracle Solaris, or an illumos? Just AMD64, or do you do SPARC builds? Is your release process written up anywhere? (I'm interested in packaging and portability, and this sounds interesting)
I use Termux on the phone. Solaris is x86 only, Oracle.
Packaging is a tarball. The program detects its run-time "sysroot" and runs from anywhere; on Solaris I make the original prefix somewhere under /opt.
Are you using PCI passthrough in your T410 for any of the VMs, or spice qxl based graphics for both.
Does the Thinkpad have optimus nvidia card?
I have a T520 with nvidia optimus, which I thought would be good for vfio pci passthrough based on r/vfio, because of it being mux based display, and nvidia having direct connection to external display. but for some reason couldn’t get it to work. I think it was because of uefi not being supported by the nvidia card, and bios mode having problem with vgaarb.
What is so strange about this? Bazillions of cloud providers are doing it on even older hardware... and OSX/macOS limitations are due to license, not technical reasons...
I find your comment about the Windows performance surprising. I always had the impression that Windows 10 was lighter than recent iteartions of macOS. May it be because animations and UI effects were disabled on macOS but not on Windows?
Licensing aside, it's just a computer OS at the end of the day. If you can get the right hardware virtualized there should be no issues. There are premade images that make it really easy to run macOS in a VM without having to go in and change a bunch of configs
There's a script linked in the post that downloads the installer directly from apple.com. Of course then you have to go through the install process yourself.
It does not require an Apple ID , it is impossible to use one without some further configuration. [1]
You can’t use the App Store without an Apple ID, so you are unable to download Xcode I think.
macOS is closed source, so we don’t really know hoe much it phones home.
Why not? HN is for “Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups” And why make an account just to say this?
My account is a bit older and I was going to say a similar thing ("Why is this upvoted so much", of course you're free to post anything you find interesting).
I really wonder what's interesting about this, maybe besides the hint that there are VM solutions for macOS. That's not in the slightest intended to be a personal attack.
I remember the early days of VMs before VT-x, etc. VMs were slooooooow, but still popular. Now that we have VT-x and the like, for some who don't play with VMs often, it can be astounding. I was super excited when I first got a windows vm running on Linux. Then later was excited to run a hackintosh. Now, if you have OS specific tools, with just two VMs running at near native speed, all tools are available at your fingertips without buying more hardware. Seems excitibg to me. Just my 2¢.
I’ve been reading HN for a while, and just recently made an account. This is my first submission of my own. I was shocked as well (I thought it might get 2 votes).
It isn’t something you hear about every day, though, virtualizing macOS, even if it isn’t too difficult.
I know the news guidelines [1] say "Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills", but I do feel like the quality of the Hacker News comment section has fallen quite a lot in recent months.
I'm not sure why the comment quality seems to be dropping.
I thought maybe I could bootcamp Windows on my 2020 MacBook Pro to play the new Age of Empires coming out later this year. But I don't even think I'm going to bother. These MacBooks are freaking garbage. I'll just buy a $700 Dell to play the game.
And... what, exactly, are you expecting to happen to this person? An Apple SWAT team to break down his door and shoot his dog?
I've happily violated hundreds of EULAs for all sorts of software in my time. They're worth less than toilet paper. I installed MacOS on my PC hardware for fun too.
Is ethical behavior worth less than toilet paper? I don't think so.
> I've happily violated hundreds of EULAs for all sorts of software in my time.
If stealing software is legitimate, then what else is legitimate to you? when does theft become legitimate in your opinion? (I don't care about your answer, really. Just think about that).
> And... what, exactly, are you expecting to happen to this person? An Apple SWAT team to break down his door and shoot his dog?
So, not being caught makes unethical stuff OK? Do you have a conscience?
> I installed MacOS on my PC hardware for fun too.
When you say "PC hardware"... Do you realize that every macOS device is also a personal computer too? The "mac and PC" dychotomy is absurd and purely marketing driven.
I'd hoped it would be a nice little stress-release valve from startup CEOing occasionally, but you really get an appreciation for how much more flexible, interoperable, and stable modern computers are. The old hardware and software is incredibly fiddly, though to be fair PC compatibility cards and Radius Rockets are themselves magnificent hacks for the most part, so it's not all that surprising that they're fiddly. That said, while just differently stressful, it's still fun and rewarding when some piece of the pie fits in place.