build Raspberry Pi OS on your Mac.

Here you will find instructions and a helper script to setup an emulated Debian Linux virtual machine to build Raspberry Pi OS on your Mac using UTM and Qemu. Under the hood this uses the official pi-gen system to build the actual OS.

Setup a Debian Linux Virtual Machine on your Mac

• install UTM
• go here Debian 10.4 (Minimal) | UTM and click ‘Open in UTM’. It will download and install a VM
• Go to networking settings on the VM, switch to Emulated VLAN and add a port forwarding as shown here for 22022 (mac side) to 22 (VM side): Setting Up Docker on macOS M1 Arm64 to Use Debian 10.4 Docker Engine - codeluge
• boot the VM
• from your Mac terminal do : ssh debian@127.0.0.1 -p 22022 to get a nice terminal (with copy and paste) into the VM.

setup deps with this script

In the VM terminal, clone this repo:

sudo apt-get install git
git clone https://github.com/joshmarinacci/mac-pi-builder.git
cd mac-pi-builder
sudo bash ./setup.sh

or paste it the contents into a file called setup.sh

sudo bash ./setup.sh

The script will install all required deps and check out the pi-gen repo, and create a file called config.txt to put your customizations. Or you can manually run the same commands that are in the script

Build your Pi OS

inside the pi-gen dir run the build.sh script as root

sudo bash ./build.sh -c ../config.txt

wait a very long time. Maybe an hour?

next steps

All of the above will work except for one problem: not enough disk space. Resizing the virtual drive is cumbersome, so I'm looking into a way to create a pre-fab debian UTM that will already have enough storage for a full build.