Tutorial on installing OS X Yosemite in VirtualBox

[IOOI]

Hi everybody,

I wrote a tutorial on how to install OS X Yosemite in VirtualBox (On a Mac OS X host)

see it here: http://sqar.blogspot.de/2014/10/install ... albox.html

enjoy!

IOOI

[socratis]

A couple of notes on your tutorial:

• You should be using the VirtualBox-native VDI format for your hard disk, not the fragile VMDK.
• The memory bug that you refer to, isn't necessarily valid, so change it to a potential warning. I tried it on mine with up to 8 GB of RAM and 128 MB VRAM. It booted just fine. More details on https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/13211

Other than that, nicely done.

[IOOI]

Great you liked it. Some questions/remarks:
- what makes VMDK more fragile than the VDI format? I always thought that VMDK is better because it is supported by other VMs too. I am wrong here?
- I tried the 8 GB RAM setup with Mavericks. That worked. At least it booted but it did not allocate the RAM. Looking into top at the host reveals:

68961 VirtualBoxVM 254.7 58:25.43 27/4 1 279 2238 3758M 67M 3815M

And looking into the guests top:

PhysMem: 2457M used (337M wired), 1127M unused.

So those 8 GB work now half way at least, but are sham, only 3,5 GB of RAM are usable. So https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/13211 seems to be just partly fixed. I reported it for 4.3.14

regards,

IOOI

[socratis]

Yes, it's kind of weird. As I said in the bug report, the "Activity Monitor" and "top" reveal only 3.5 GB allocated. On the other hand, "About this Mac" and "System Profiler" report 8 GB. And the VBox.log is quite happy to report that it has allocated 8 GB. Which makes me believe that there is a discrepancy on the Mac guest as to where it's getting its memory information from.

I vaguely remember that the VBox's EFI implementation only passes 3.5 GB to the client, but I could be way wrong. Now, why the Mac reports two numbers for the memory is beyond my comprehensive capabilities. Unfortunately EFI was implemented in VirtualBox just to support the Mac guests, so there is no way at this moment to test it with another type of client.

As for the VMDK format, I got the information from these forums here, mainly by Don (mpack) who has a really deep understanding of the virtual disk formats. He's the author of the CloneVDI tool. Search for "mpack VMDK".

[loukingjr]

Just installed 10.10.1 on my 10.10.1 host.

Personally I don't find it very usable.
I noticed quite a few anomalies.
1. No matter what I set the VRAM to, in About This Mac the graphics memory always says 8MB.
2. If I set the RAM to 8GBs it does recognize it although about 6GBs is used. On the other hand the CPU% usage is very low at idle.
3. The mouse is very sluggish even with tracking turned all the way up.
4. The CPU is listed as Unknown in About This Mac although the processor speed is correct.
5. Overall performance isn't great which without 3D acceleration is to be expected.

To be honest, I don't know why OSX is listed as a supported guest because of all the hoops one has to jump through to get a particular OSX version to run on a particular Mac. Plus it has never had guest addition support.

Just my thoughts.

edit: I forgot to mention I set the CPU count to 2 but the guest thinks it has 1 CPU with 2 threads.

[IOOI]

Yes, it's kind of weird. As I said in the bug report, the "Activity Monitor" and "top" reveal only 3.5 GB allocated. On the other hand, "About this Mac" and "System Profiler" report 8 GB. And the VBox.log is quite happy to report that it has allocated 8 GB. Which makes me believe that there is a discrepancy on the Mac guest as to where it's getting its memory information from.

I vaguely remember that the VBox's EFI implementation only passes 3.5 GB to the client, but I could be way wrong. Now, why the Mac reports two numbers for the memory is beyond my comprehensive capabilities. Unfortunately EFI was implemented in VirtualBox just to support the Mac guests, so there is no way at this moment to test it with another type of client.

As for the VMDK format, I got the information from these forums here, mainly by Don (mpack) who has a really deep understanding of the virtual disk formats. He's the author of the CloneVDI tool. Search for "mpack VMDK".

VirtualBox 4.3.20 was released some hours ago. It tackles this bug just in part: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/13211 is closed now but https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/11103 is still open and says: "Partly fixed in VBox 4.3.20. The ICH9 problem is still not fixed but with PIIX3 it's possible to announce more than 3.5G to the guest." So there's some hope to get this fixed somewhat soon …

[danardi]

I've use your guide, but my machine is stopped at first boot..

the last line is

Code: Select all

**** [IOBluetoothHCIController][SearchForTransportEventTimeOutHeader] -- Missing Bluetooth Controller Transport!

It don't go more (after 3 hours I was waiting)

Schermata 2015-03-17 alle 00.15.27 copia.jpg (123.04 KiB) Viewed 43091 times

[ChipMcK]

Using a LapTop ?
If so, which ?

[danardi]

whit a MacBookPro retina 15" with GeForce 750M

[mpack]

As for the VMDK format, I got the information from these forums here, mainly by Don (mpack) who has a really deep understanding of the virtual disk formats. He's the author of the CloneVDI tool. Search for "mpack VMDK".

On the fragility front, you were thinking of VHD. The VMDK format is not fragile, in fact it's a very competent format.

The only problem here is that it is not the VirtualBox native format (that would be VDI), and for that reason is not as fully supported as VDI is. For example, "modifyd --resize" doesn't work on VMDK. A tutorial should not IMHO be encouraging users along a secondary route.

[ oops! Just noticed how old this topic is. Oh well, never mind. ]

[ChipMcK]

whit a MacBookPro retina 15" with GeForce 750M

I have a MacBookAir and have opened 13361.
You may add your documents (logs, screenshots) to the ticket.


BTW. this oops s unrelated to the topic of this thread.

[danardi]

It don't seem to be the same issue... are you sure?

[ChipMcK]

It don't seem to be the same issue... are you sure?

Same screen image since 4.3.20 when creating VM

[konatidg]

Has anyone found a solution to these issues? We're trying to set up Yosemite VMs on a Yosemite host with Virtual Box 5.0.4 and are running into these issues:

With default settings performance is very slow. The mouse stutters around the screen instead of moving smoothly.
If memory is increased beyond the 2gb default the login screen pops up continuously.
Increasing memory/CPU/vram from defaults results in green lines scattered across the GUI.

We've had a great experience with VBox so far and are using it to facilitate automation testing on Windows/Mac machine. Just need to get past these performance issues.

Is there a older version of VBox or OSX we should use to workaround until these things are fixed?

[FrancisChung]

Just a follow up on Konatidg's post.

I was wondering if anyone has overcome the performance issues mentioned below?