Mac OS X build instructions

The Mac OS X port is not yet completed. These instructions are here for those who wish to help out.

Prerequisites on Mac OS X

• Mac OS X running on Intel hardware (PowerPC hardware is not supported).
• A recent Xcode installation (only the GCC and SDKs are really needed).
• Some stuff from DarwinPorts (​http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/getdp/)
  • The i386-elf-gcc package (this requirement will probably go away later.)
  • libidl
  • libsdl

Building VirtualBox

1. Change to the root directory of the sources and execute the configure script:

   ./configure --disable-sdl-ttf
   

   If it finds everything it needs, it will create a file called 'AutoConfig.kmk' containing paths to the various tools on your system. Also, it will create an environment setup script called configure.sh. This step only has to be done once (if something changes in your build tool setup, you might have to repeat it but keep in mind that both output files will be overwritten).
2. Whenever you want to build VirtualBox, you have to open a shell and source the generated environment setup script 'env.sh', i.e. do

   . ./env.sh
   

3. To build type

   kmk
   

   The default is to a release build, should you wish to do a debug or profile build add BUILD_TYPE=debug or BUILD_TYPE=profile as argument to kmk or export it as an environment variable in your shell.

Running VirtualBox

As mentioned elsewhere, the Mac OS X port of VirtualBox is work in progress. Only the very basic GUI (VBoxBFE) is available and because the supporting kernel extension (trunk/src/VBox/HostDrivers/Support) isn't ported yet, the guest performance is quite terrible.

1. VirtualBox must be instructed not to try use the missing kernel extension.

   export VBOX_SUPLIB_FAKE="fake"
   

2. Enter out/darwin.x86/release/bin.
3. Run ./VBoxBFE -m 32

If you have a knoppix ISO or similar hanging around, you can try start it like this:

./VBoxBFE -m 128 -cdrom /Users/name/Desktop/knoppix-3.7.iso -boot d -natdev1 080286000042

Misc stuff

• Put OS X into legacy mode (pure 32bit):

  nvram boot-args="-legacy"