Mac OS Catalina VM on unRAID 6.10.3

[Zippi]

Hi everyone,

I have installed Mac OS Catalina through Macinabox and so far everything is OK.

Since I have an MSI Radeon HD7950 Twin Frozr GPU that I bought some time ago because it was among the few that did not suffer from the infamous RESET BUG I wanted to add it to Catalina VM.

I dumped the VBIOS ROM with Techpowerup and it made me a 132Kb file. I didn't use the one made by Spaceinvaders One because it generated me a file of only 70Kb which is probably not good.

I have assigned the GPU to the VM but it doesn't work.

Since I am a newbie I ask you for help: should the GPU work like this or do you have to tweak some parameters like when building a baremetal Hackintosh?

Do I have to set something else?

GPU video e audio are together so no vfio, right?

 

My hardware is:

Motherboard: AsRock X299 Taichi

CPU: i9 7980XE 18C/36T

GPU: MSI Radeon HD7950 Twin Frozr OC 3 Gb GDDR5

 

Thanx in advance!

 

Zippi

 

[ghost82]

On 9/8/2022 at 10:35 PM, Zippi said:

I dumped the VBIOS ROM with Techpowerup and it made me a 132Kb file. I didn't use the one made by Spaceinvaders One because it generated me a file of only 70Kb which is probably not good.

It is always recommended to dump your own bios file: the 70 kb file could be good, I would check it with an hex editor and see what it's inside.

If the dumped file is crap, you should search and solve why you are not able to dump the vbios: this is recommended, because if the gpu is in use by the host you wont be able to use it even with a proper vbios.

 

On 9/8/2022 at 10:35 PM, Zippi said:

Since I am a newbie I ask you for help: should the GPU work like this or do you have to tweak some parameters like when building a baremetal Hackintosh?

It works the same way as a bare metal hackintosh, you need lilu/whatevergreen kexts and all the workarounds (if any) needed for bare metal hackintosh.

The only thing that changes compared to bare metal is that you need also to set the topology of the vm: make sure to pass both video and audio of the gpu, set them as a multifunction device (same bus, same slot, different function) and do not use bus 0.

 

On 9/8/2022 at 10:35 PM, Zippi said:

GPU video e audio are together so no vfio, right?

It is recommended to attach them to vfio; not sure what you are asking: you need to passthrough both devices (audio and video, so 2 checkmarks), if they are alone in the same iommu group it's ok, if they are together with some other device use acs patch to split them.

 

On top of this make sure the vbios of the gpu is uefi, otherwise nothing will work.

Edited September 14, 2022 by ghost82

[Zippi]

On 9/13/2022 at 11:50 AM, ghost82 said:

It is always recommended to dump your own bios file: the 70 kb file could be good, I would check it with an hex editor and see what it's inside.

If the dumped file is crap, you should search and solve why you are not able to dump the vbios: this is recommended, because if the gpu is in use by the host you wont be able to use it even with a proper vbios.

 

It works the same way as a bare metal hackintosh, you need lilu/whatevergreen kexts and all the workarounds (if any) needed for bare metal hackintosh.

The only thing that changes compared to bare metal is that you need also to set the topology of the vm: make sure to pass both video and audio of the gpu, set them as a multifunction device (same bus, same slot, different function) and do not use bus 0.

 

It is recommended to attach them to vfio; not sure what you are asking: you need to passthrough both devices (audio and video, so 2 checkmarks), if they are alone in the same iommu group it's ok, if they are together with some other device use acs patch to split them.

 

On top of this make sure the vbios of the gpu is uefi, otherwise nothing will work.

 

Hi ghost82,

meanwhile, thanks for your answer .....

I try to better explain what I did:

 

1 - This GPU has a UEFI custom bios because originally it was NOT UEFI. It is natively recognized on the Mac Pro without any problems.

 

2 - I re-extracted the vBIOS via Windows 10 VM (I know it's not the best) and the file is 132KB

 

3 - I installed virt manager because unlike the one I saw in the Spaceinvader One video, Macinabox didn't give me the option to choose if I wanted it or not. Maybe it's this latest version of Macinabox that no longer includes it, I don't know ..... I installed it to better see everything on the VMs.

 

4 - I copied the EFI partition folders of the bootloader to the EFI partition of the Mac OS installed as Spaceinvader One did in the video and I did not touch any of the various parameters because I would not even be able, that's why I asked if I needed to retouch some parameters like when building a Hackintosh.

 

5 - I did NOT use VFIO nor ACS patch, audio and video were already on the correct bus together. I also specify that this GPU is the only one installed on unRAID.

 

However now everything works!

 

I see Catalina both on the monitor attached to unRAID and via the web as a vm on another computer!

 

Thanks again for your time, I really appreciate it !!

 

Zippi

 

[ghost82]

2 hours ago, Zippi said:

This GPU has a UEFI custom bios because originally it was NOT UEFI

Yes, I added a note to my post above as I saw later that that gpu could be without uefi in bios and as you know mac os doesn't work without uefi gpu (at least versions of latest years).

 

2 hours ago, Zippi said:

I installed virt manager because unlike the one I saw in the Spaceinvader One video, Macinabox didn't give me the option to choose if I wanted it or not. Maybe it's this latest version of Macinabox that no longer includes it, I don't know

Yes, the actual version of macinabox doesn't include virt-manager.

 

2 hours ago, Zippi said:

I copied the EFI partition folders of the bootloader to the EFI partition of the Mac OS installed as Spaceinvader One did in the video

Take into account that you can avoid this, you can have a separate disk with the EFI files (opencore.qcow2, opencore.img or whatever you want) and let the original apple EFI files on the disk; you will boot from the separate disk which will find and boot mac os disk; by this way you can easily replace the EFI disk without having access to the mac os disk.

Anyway both ways work.

 

2 hours ago, Zippi said:

that's why I asked if I needed to retouch some parameters like when building a Hackintosh

It's similar, but not the same; when you build a virtual machine with machinabox all the hardware is emulated, even the cpu, so the basic setup should work for all without any change. Thing change when you passthrough hardware (like gpu, ethernet, usb, etc.), when you customize things changes to the opencore config could be mandatory to make all the things work together.

 

2 hours ago, Zippi said:

I did NOT use VFIO nor ACS patch, audio and video were already on the correct bus together

In real you used vfio; when you passthrough hardware to a vm, in this case the gpu, you are attaching it to the vfio driver.

 

2 hours ago, Zippi said:

However now everything works!

And this is the important thing!!!