Re:macOS Nix setup: an alternative to Homebrew (2020)
by heavyset_go on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @05:01PM
(#27838392)
> You're running linux (with nix installed) on the bare metal of a mac, and then a VM on top of that running macos (with VFIO passthrough so it's not dog-slow?), is that right?
You got it.
> Performance is pretty reasonable? APFS works fine in this setup?
Works well enough for my use cases. It's certainly less slow and fragile than running Linux in a VM via macOS.
APFS works fine in the VM, but I use HFS+ just because there are more mature tools to poke at HFS+ images than APFS, right now. The APFS FUSE drivers work well and support reading and writing[1]. There's a closed source driver that supports writing and encryption, though[2].
> No gotchas with drive encryption? ... actually, if your machine does use drive encryption, which is doing it, linux or mac? I don't know enough about mac hardware to know if there is some mac boot environment that handles encryption and then hands off to the OS (be it macos or linux).
I don't use T2 disk encryption, I just let Linux handle partition encryption. Apparently there's support here[3] for it, though.
You got it.
> Performance is pretty reasonable? APFS works fine in this setup?
Works well enough for my use cases. It's certainly less slow and fragile than running Linux in a VM via macOS.
APFS works fine in the VM, but I use HFS+ just because there are more mature tools to poke at HFS+ images than APFS, right now. The APFS FUSE drivers work well and support reading and writing[1]. There's a closed source driver that supports writing and encryption, though[2].
> No gotchas with drive encryption? ... actually, if your machine does use drive encryption, which is doing it, linux or mac? I don't know enough about mac hardware to know if there is some mac boot environment that handles encryption and then hands off to the OS (be it macos or linux).
I don't use T2 disk encryption, I just let Linux handle partition encryption. Apparently there's support here[3] for it, though.
[1] https://github.com/sgan81/apfs-fuse
[2] https://www.paragon-software.com/us/business/apfs-linux/
[3] https://wiki.t2linux.org/