gbos-vm

OmacVM is an open-source tool that installs and runs Omarchy, an Arch Linux ARM desktop, in a virtual machine on Apple Silicon Macs. A setup script builds the VM and configures it for OmacVM.app, UTM, VMware Fusion, or Parallels Desktop, while Mac-side helpers pass hardware and system features to the VM over a private network secured by a secret token. These integrations include trackpad gestures, macOS-like scrolling, keyboard and media keys, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, audio, battery status, displays, camera, microphone, clipboard sharing, theme and wallpaper synchronization, and the Omanotch bar beside the MacBook notch. The command-line interface can build VMs, switch features, update installations, check compatibility, manage VM resources, and list VMs. It requires an Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 15 for OmacVM.app or macOS 14 for the other virtualization routes, and about 30 GB of free disk space. OmacVM is released under the MIT license.

QEMU is an open-source machine emulator and virtualizer (the QEMU Project) that performs system and user-mode emulation across many CPU architectures (x86, ARM, PowerPC, RISC-V, etc.) and boots disk images or ISO files as guest systems. It provides a broad set of emulated peripherals and virtual devices — including virtual GPU devices (virtio-gpu, qxl, cirrus, and related 3D paths such as virgl) — supports hardware-assisted virtualization (KVM) and device passthrough (VFIO), and is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

Try Omarchy is a macOS application that runs the upstream Omarchy desktop on Apple Silicon Macs without manual setup. It packages a project-built ARM64 Arch Linux image configured with Omarchy Quattro, a QEMU runtime using Apple's Hypervisor Framework, and a Swift/AppKit launcher. The guest image is built from pinned Arch Linux ARM packages and a pinned Omarchy source revision, with temporary fixes recorded by hash in the guest build specification. The application provides hardware-accelerated ARM64 virtualization and VirGL graphics, a resizable native window with automatic guest-resolution and HiDPI updates, Mac audio input and output selection, two-way clipboard sharing for text and PNG images, one optional shared Mac folder, and loopback-only TCP and UDP port forwarding from macOS into Omarchy. It is distributed as a signed and notarized DMG, and the first launch provisions the Linux account and guest environment. Video decoding is currently CPU-only, which can make high-resolution playback slow. Try Omarchy is not official or affiliated with Omarchy.

Backburner is a pre-release local-LLM inference tool by StayLameBro that uses an iPhone alongside an Apple Silicon Mac to run Qwen3.8-27B over a USB-C connection. Its llama.cpp-based engine splits prefill computation between the Mac and phone: the Mac runs the initial model layers while the iPhone runs later layers, and for contexts beyond the Mac's available 8-bit capacity the phone stores older key-value pages and computes attention over them. The phone can also use its GPU and Neural Engine during decoding, while the Mac uses custom Metal, SME2, and DFlash2 speculative-decoding kernels. It exposes an OpenAI-compatible server at localhost:8080 and supports iPhones 15 Pro or newer and M-series iPads, although the documented testing uses iPhone 16 Pro Max and 17 Pro Max devices. The project requires a 10 Gb/s USB-C cable, distributes its iPhone app through AltStore or an Xcode build, and is released under the MIT license.

Virtual Mac on iPad is a community project that runs macOS in a hardware-virtualized virtual machine on compatible Apple-silicon iPads. Its tooling extracts and rebuilds the virtualization frameworks required from macOS's shared cache, allowing macOS applications such as Xcode, Terminal, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro to run on the device. The project requires a jailbroken iPad Pro with an M1 or M2 chip or an M1 iPad Air running iPadOS 14 through 16.3.1. It is distributed as a package through the project's Cydia repository and installed with Sileo; the project states that it is unaffiliated with Apple, Dopamine, UTM, and VirtualBuddy.