All about Mac firmware, from PowerPC Open Firmware to Apple silicon’s LLB and iBoot, and what the rules are for updating firmware.
VM
Sequoia’s macOS VMs and Apple ID, USB storage and other devices, number of concurrent VMs, nested virtualisation, and how to run Sequoia beta in a VM on Sonoma.
T1 and T2 chips in Intel Macs, integral in M-series chips, used in Sequoia’s virtual machines at last, and an essential feature in Private Cloud Compute.
Sparse files are now common among databases, disk images, and virtual machines. How they work in APFS, how they’re created, and how they can explode.
Virtualisation of macOS on Apple silicon does deliver performance that’s impressively close to that of the host. Here are the figures to demonstrate it.
In a wide range of in-core tests, CPU performance in VMs is close to that of code running native on the host, and M3 VMs are faster than M1 native. With one significant exception.
When running on M3 hosts, macOS VMs lack support for some of the instruction set, and Accelerate commands may be much slower. Why?
New version helps you check which features are available in your Mac’s CPU, and more, linking to a page here with detailed information.
How to change the password for an encrypted sparse bundle, and how to use an ISO keyboard in a macOS VM on Apple silicon.
If you run macOS virtual machines (VMs) on Apple silicon Macs using lightweight virtualisation, you may wish to […]
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