Landon Fuller

Running 10.4.11 under VMWare Fusion 6

Introduction

I recently agreed to port a small piece of code to Tiger (10.4), assuming that it would be relatively easy to bring up Tiger up in VMWare Fusion on my Mavericks desktop; I already keep VMs for all of the other Mac OS X releases starting from 10.6.

As it turns out, it wasn't so easy; after downloading a copy of 10.4 Server from the Apple Developer site, I found that the installer DVD would panic immediately on boot. Apparently Tiger uses uses the older CPUID[2] mechanism for fetching processor cache and TLB information (see xnu's set_intel_cache_info() and page 3-171 of the Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual, Volume 2).

Virtualized systems query the hosts' real CPUID data to acquire basic information on supported CPU futures; newer processors -- mine included -- do not include cache descriptor information in CPUID[2]. Unable to read CPUID[2], the Tiger kernel left the cache line size initialized to 0 in set_intel_cache_info(), and then panicked immediately thereafter when initializing the commpage and checking for (and not finding) a required 64 byte cache line size.

In theory, VMware Fusion has support for masking CPUID values for compatibility with the guest OS by editing the .vmx configuration by hand, but I wasn't able to get any cpuid mask values to actually apply, so I eventually settled for binary patching the Tiger kernel to force proper initialization of the cache_linesize value.

If you find yourself needing to run Tiger for whatever reason, I've packaged up my patch as a small command line tool. It successfully applies against the 10.4.7 and 10.4.11 kernels that I tried. While you should run it against /mach_kernel after mounting the Tiger file system under your host OS, I found that tool worked just fine just fine when run directly against my raw VMware disk image file, as well as against the Mac OS X Server 10.4.7 installation DMG.

Using the tool, I was able to install 10.4.7, upgrade to 10.4.11, and then patch the 10.4.11 VMDK to allow booting into the upgraded system.

Source Code

You can download the source here. Obviously, this is totally unsupported and could destroy all life as we know it, or just your Tiger VM; use at your own risk.