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points by nichtverstehen 4 days ago | 0 comments

Author here. Happy to answer questions.

Excellent article. Just the battle I'm fighting now in terms of virtualization.

Could you please share how you setup the host Mac? Which pmset settings, defaults, tips and tricks for it?

Thank you!

We have all the hosts enrolled into MDM, so we have all sorts of access ready: SSH, KVM, VNC, MDM. With Macs in the DC we found having all these ways to access the machines is really essential. Things break in unexpected ways.

In terms of settings, besides the obvous (do not sleep, do not auto-update, etc), disabling USB restricted mode helps a lot (Privacy&Security > Allow accessories to connect) - no need to approve connected devices via UI.

What are you building if it's not a secret?

[–] egorfine 4 days ago

MDM is essential, yes.

I'm building a EU Mac mini hosting service. Very early stage, I have just bootstrapped the company.

[–] egorfine 4 days ago

... and I'm slooowly very slowly thinking of creating a "mock Docker".

Think 80% of Dockerfile syntax supported for running "docker build" against macOS guests. I do have some pieces already done here and there and basically it all comes down to actually creating a product out of a pile of various working scripts (OSS obviously). That's the hardest part.

And then comes the final boss of the game: marketing. Not sure anyone needs this at all.

[–] ectoloph 4 days ago

How do you partition the cores between the VMs?

With up to three tiers of cores (Super/Performance/Efficiency), how do you handle getting them split evenly to customers?

[–] nichtverstehen 4 days ago

Apple doesn't give direct control over that unfortunately. Here is an excellent article on that topic: https://eclecticlight.co/2023/10/23/how-does-macos-manage-vi...

[–] saagarjha 4 days ago

Virtualization does not expose this to VMs

[–] shambu2k 4 days ago

I remember seeing on X about someone building iOS apps on Omarchy - have you something tried similar?

[–] gorilla_fight 4 days ago

Link for reference: https://github.com/joshuaswarren/omarchy-apple-dev

It has been used to build and and submit an app on a Linux machine, according to: https://x.com/JoshuaSWarren/status/2109068298537066710

This directly challenges the author's claim "You can't build iOS apps without a Mac."

omarchy-apple-dev is built on: https://xtool.sh which is "a cross-platform (Linux/WSL/macOS) tool that replicates Xcode functionality with open standards."

There's also: https://github.com/MarcoDotIO/Ycode - which even includes an experimental simulator.

[–] nichtverstehen 4 days ago

That stack is based on xtool at its core (xtool.io). It's very cool, but still early for steady enterprise use IMO.

Also it doesn't have iOS Simulator, so automated testing is out of question. I doubt that porting the Simulator would be feasible, since it requires macOS kernel.

Well, maybe with XNU in a VM and reimplementing parts of macOS userland. Would love to see someone try.

[–] egorfine 4 days ago

Also: which solution you have chosen for the p2p deployment? I used to manage deployments on a large scale cluster and got it down from 2h to <1m using libtorrent.

[–] nichtverstehen 4 days ago

Yeah, as alluded to in the post, we have a custom p2p distribution, very inspired by BitTorrent. So you're on the right track :). We'll probably share more on that topic at some point too.

But honestly before we had that, we started with a system where nodes pulled whole images from each other (a decentralized algorithm without central coordination, but no chunking). It worked surprisingly well considering how simple the implementation was.

[–] throwaway_1016 4 days ago

What are you using for external 10G nic? Any recommendations?

[–] gnabgib 4 days ago

You already have an answer[0], and have asked this twice [1] since.. are you automated?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50360432

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50360445

[–] throwaway_1016 4 days ago

Well, I asked once, then I saw a relevant thread, then I saw the author.

[–] allywilson 4 days ago

Do you think Apple will allow more than 2 VMs at some point?

[–] nichtverstehen 4 days ago

I was hopeful that they might lift the limit with a refresh of Mac Pro (it even had a rack mount version). But with Mac Pro discontinued not keeping the hopes up anymore.

[–] saagarjha 4 days ago

Psst…macOS images are IPSWs, not XIPs

[–] nichtverstehen 4 days ago

Doh :/. An LLM would not make such a silly mistake.

Fixing, thank you!