virtualbox.org

socratis wrote:There are some people in the list (I'm looking at you rpmurray ) that have tweaked the registers presented to the VM successfully.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

Actually what I was doing was presenting a different Family, Model and Stepping; changing the CPUID so that the OS X on the guest thinks it's running on a different processor. According to Intel, good programming practice would be to not take that information at face value but to actually test the CPU registers for supported features. OS X uses the CPUID as a quick way to identify the CPU and see if it's in a list of CPUs supported by that particular version of OS X.

The VB devs have been making modifications since 4.3.8 that tweak the MSRs. It's been the bane of my existence because it breaks my earlier installs of OS X 10.4 and 10.5 as VMs. If Brantone hasn't already tried it, it might be a good idea to try VB 4.3.6 on one of the problematic Macs to rule out the new changes in VB.

I'm still wondering why anyone would want to run a 10.9.2 guest on a 10.9.3 host. Or why they haven't updated to 10.9.4.

As far as problematic. I think trying to get OSX to run as a guest on any Mac is a pain.

loukingjr wrote:I think trying to get OSX to run as a guest on any Mac is a pain.

It's not a pain but a challenge. I'm not crazy, just eccentric.

rpmurray wrote:If Brantone hasn't already tried it, it might be a good idea to try VB 4.3.6 on one of the problematic Macs to rule out the new changes in VB.

I know I had tried earlier versions all the way back to 4.3.0, based on some forum post (I think it was something about how 4.3.8 had a bug) ... while a buddy tried others as well. Can't find it in my notes that I did 4.3.6 but will check with him if he did, if not, give it a go for sanity sake.
One of the things I did try was tweaking the CPUID, per other threads/posts.

Good to know about the Mactracker processor info ... at first was just checking high-level stats (ex: i5 vs. i7), didn't realize such drastic change when combining that with the year, thus Sandy vs Ivy.

rpmurray wrote:

loukingjr wrote:I think trying to get OSX to run as a guest on any Mac is a pain.

It's not a pain but a challenge. I'm not crazy, just eccentric.

well, I was done with Mac guest challenges when I got 10.10 installed.

Btw, if anyone else finds their way here wondering about "kSMCKeyNotFound", or any of the errors mentioned in the initial post bullet points ... they were red herrings ... when the VM did finally load, it also spat out these errors then continued on without a fuss.