FYI: https://patchew.org/QEMU/20260324204855.29759-1-mohamed@unpr...
There's some randomness around Tahoe for FileVault and it crashing because Data is detected as not encrypted (and that's not OK on bare metal). If hitting that case you might need to enable FileVault inside the VM (and remember to sync aux storage afterwards if not done)
Looks like someone beat me to it! Thanks!
I see the author of this patch set has run into a few similar issues as me. Strangely, not all of them: I don't see patches for the new PCI MSI-X device introduced somewhere in Sequoia (IIRC), a source of kernel panics for me; and there's still a bug in the PG MMIO path that casts all writes to 32-bit, this one caused me a lot of headaches (no errors but no video adapter detected). I'm somewhat surprised to hear that this works!
There's two significant problems that we both have came across:
- LLVM now favoring pre-indexed load/stores which trap with ISV=0 for MMIO accesses, and those ending up in the GIC initialization path of the newer macOS kernels (looks like there's a separate patch set for this [0]),
- Hypervisor.framework trapping PAC HVC calls.
It seems like the latter has been worked around here by signing QEMU with an Apple-private entitlement and running with SIP off, but there's actually a different way! While some HVCs are trapped right in the host kernel, the PAC trapping happens within Hypervisor.framework itself (at least in the host OSes I tested). It's possible to patch out this functionality without special privileges or talk to the in-kernel hypervisor directly. I originally tested with the former, and chose to implement the latter as a separate accel in the code I was planning to submit upstream, but the complexity of it exploded and, besides confirming that it would have worked, I haven't managed to finish my implementation.
Does the Tahoe crash you mentioned manifest itself in stage 2 iBoot panics? I must admit 26 was never quite my priority so I haven't looked into it, but if so, it might have been closer to booting than I thought :)
[0] https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2026-04/msg...