I have a working MacOS VM running with unRAID being used as a desktop and it is great. I have iMessage, full iCloud, Radeon RX570 passsthrough all working thanks to SpaceInvader's brilliant Macinabox docker to get things going.  Reading around as I haven't looked at Mac VMs for some time there seems to be a move away from Clover to Opencore these days. I am not sure what advantages that brings though - is it worth moving to it, what would I gain?

 

One thing I am interested in is making sure that the VM is using all the latest CPU capabilities to the full. I am currently in Penryn mode in my XML and as I understand there are a lot of potential performance gains to be had by implementing something newer. At this point though I don't know if I can simply pass through my 8th gen i5 and it should work seamlessly or I need to do something else? and whether this has to do with opencore or not?!

 

 

Opencore should be preferred mainly because it is made by team Acidanthera, the same team that is updating the basic kexts needed, lilu, whatevergreen, applealc, virtualsmc.

These kexts are tested only with opencore bootloader.

I prefer opencore vs clover, opencore tries to be as close as possible to mac os bootloader.

The team is very professional, especially vit9696 and Download-fritz, but all the members have very good knowledge of what they are doing.

Sometimes they seem to be rude, especially if you write something in the forum on insanelymac, but I don't mind, I can understand their reactions: for them all is quite easy, so they espect every (or most of) users are able to solve their issues through debug.

Opencore has also a great bugtracker on github and you can be sure that if you fill a real bug it will be solved.

It also has a very good documentation.

You can see for the latest big sur, the first bootloader to be able to boot it was opencore.

Clover now is including part of the code of opencore (so you can use ocquirks).

It's your choice but some of the issues described here with unraid/macinabox are due to the bootloader in use (clover).

 

Switching to opencore is not so difficult, but you need to take care to import all the smbios platform data, otherwise your imessage/facetime and maybe icloud will be messed up and it will not work and it will be locked by apple.

Edited July 31, 20205 yr by ghost82

Okay great thanks, I have managed to switch out the clover EFI folder for opencore and it boots at least, although my VNC keyboard doesn't work yet...I'll spend some time reading up around it and how to configure stuff like serial numbers etc.

 

Thanks.

Edited July 31, 20205 yr by planetwilson