macOS guest VMs under KVM on Omarchy M (Apple Silicon): working, with a clean GPU desktop

[sapoepsilon]

macOS 26.4 guests (with Xcode 27.2) now boot under KVM on an M1 Max running Omarchy M, and a full desktop renders cleanly over VNC. It's a port of aquarat/apple-macos-arm64-vm-guest (Fedora Asahi) to Omarchy, packaged as a small CLI, omvm: https://github.com/sapoepsilon/omvm. Write-up of how it works: https://github.com/sapoepsilon/omvm/blob/main/docs/graphics.md

What it takes on the host

• A side-by-side linux-aurora-vmapple kernel: linux-aurora plus two small KVM patches, built from Omarchy's own PKGBUILD. Stock linux-aurora stays installed.
• A QEMU with the vmapple machine on KVM, and steelbrain/reims-vgpu for the paravirtual GPU (Metal → Vulkan).
• A private Honeykrisp (Mesa) build with an 11-line patch that exposes VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock. The system Mesa isn't touched.
• A one-time step in macOS. Apple's Virtualization framework restores the VM, and the boot ROM comes from the user's own macOS install. No Apple files are redistributed.

Results

• SSH is up in about 25 s, and CPU-bound work runs at 95–99% of host speed.
• The desktop draws without artifacts: wallpaper, Dock, icons and menus.
• The two-guest limit from Apple's licence is enforced.

Questions for maintainers

1. Is there interest in KVM support for macOS guests in linux-aurora itself? The NISV MMIO-emulation patch is GPL-2.0. The PAC VM-key patch is waiting on a licence from its author (Licensing steelbrain/experiment-macOS-arm64-on-asahi-linux-arm64#1).
2. Would omarchy-mac-pkgs packages for the QEMU and GPU pieces be welcome, or should this stay third-party (AUR)?
3. omarchy-apple-silicon-boot-check assumes exactly one Apple kernel, so a second kernel trips omarchy update. Would a supported "extra kernel" pattern make sense?

Upstream reports: steelbrain/reims-vgpu#150, steelbrain/metal2vulkan#12, aquarat/apple-macos-arm64-vm-guest#1.

Tested on MacBookPro18,4 (M1 Max), linux-aurora 7.2.11 (aurora15), macOS host 26.6.2. Built with AI assistance (Claude Code).