Can Fusion solve LG 5K display not supported by El Capitan problem?

[westsoc]

Can Fusion solve a problem involving LG 5K Ultrafine display which only works in Sierra, and a software only works in El Capitan? The goal is for LG 5K to work in El Capitan.

The Problem

I am a researcher and my  job critically depends on Papers 3, a software for organizing and referencing research papers. Currently Papers 3 only works in El Capitan and not Sierra. Often I have 10 research papers opened on the screen and the details of the figures are hard to see. So I bought two LG 5K Ultrafine displays. Unfortunately the LG 5K  only works in Sierra, but not in El Capitan. Made several trips to Apple Store and experts there suggested virtual machine might be the solution.

In Need of a Solution

Can VMware Fusion  solve the above problem? I am not a computer person;  If yes, how to set it up? An apple specialist had suggested that I should install Sierra and my document folder (which have 500GB data) as the  host because the computer could then drive the LG 5K with full resolution and also should install El Capitan and Papers 3 as guest in the virtual machine. My question is in this setup will the guest virtual machine El Capitan have the same LG 5K resolution as the host Sierra? It appears that Fusion does support 5K display. But an VMware support person said that using Fusion will not solve the above problem as El Capitan, no matter running as a host or guest, still will not support 5K. I hope he is wrong.

If Fusion does not solve the above problem,  Are there any other methods that will solve the above problem?

If Fusion does not solve the above problem, No need to read the following.

Other Questions

I understand that Fusion can mirror or share  folders between the host and the guest, thus there is no need to have two same 500GB documents folders, one for the host and one for the guest. Is this correct? If it is correct, it will make Time Machine backup of new data easier because there is only one documents folder in the entire Mac as the virtual machine does not have one.  Time machine backup can be done by simply turning off the virtual machine.

I also have a 2014 MacBook Air and a 2012 Mac Mini, both with 256GB SSD.  If VMware Fusion can indeed solve the above mentioned problem, can I run the above mentioned setup using Fusion in a bootable external 1TB SSD drive connected to one of them?

[bluefirestorm]

I don't know if it can solve the problem you have with the LG 5K display. From what I understand, a Thunderbolt 3 connection is required to drive the a 5K display and El Capitan does not have the software drivers to support Thunderbolt 3 devices. It also depends on what your macOS machine(s) are.

I also have a 2014 MacBook Air and a 2012 Mac Mini, both with 256GB SSD

These two models are not in the list of systems that are compatible with the LG 5K display as they don't have Thunderbolt 3 ports.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207448

To use an LG 5K display at 5120x2880 you need at either a 2017 iMac or 2016/2017 MacBook Pro. Lower resolutions are supported for earlier systems but that defeats the purpose of buying a 5K display.

For the VMware Fusion and its features, it is best for to download a 30-day trial.

https://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/fusion-evaluation.html

[westsoc]

Thanks for ur reply; I appreciate it.

Based on the suggestion from Apple, I did buy a thunderbolt 2 to thunderbolt 3 converter which is attached to the LG 5K display.

All the macs that I owned have thunderbolt 2 outputs and when they are installed with Sierra, do work with LG 5K, but not El Capitan, which as u said does not have the driver for the LG 5K.

The crux of the matter is wether using Fusion, when Sierra is the host and El Capitan as the guest, the display driver for the virtual machine El Capitan is actually using the driver of the host. Two very knowledgeable apple Store software support experts think this is the case. I thought I would ask the experts in this forum to confirm it.

The way I am thinking of getting around of using 256GB Mac to support a 500GB documents folder is to copy the the folders to a 1TB SSD and run it as an external bootable disk installed with either El Capitan or Sierra. The bootable external disk could also serve as another backup in addition to Time Machine. Samsung just came up a T5 1TB SSD for $400. Able to make use older macs with insufficient storage and also serve as a bootable backup, $400 is not expensive.

[ColoradoMarmot]

First, that software company needs to get current -  El Cap will no longer get security patches after High Sierra's released in October. 

The actual display hardware is not exposed to the guest, just the host.  However, that also means that El Cap will not receive any 3d acceleration, and if the application uses those functions, it simply won't work inside Fusion.  You'd actually have better luck with a windows guest than a mac guest in that regard.

What you're running into is a driver issue, it's that El Cap simply doesn't have any HDPI resolutions available for a 5k monitor.  It should work, just in a degraded resolution.

[westsoc]

Thank u for taking the time to help me out.

I am not a computer person and don't have the knowledge to understand "However, that also means that El Cap will not receive any 3d acceleration, and if the application uses those functions, it simply won't work inside Fusion.  You'd actually have better luck with a windows guest than a mac guest in that regard."

What does 3rd acceleration mean? And somehow windows guest is not subject to "3rd party acceleration"? Obviously, getting the retina resolution from the 5K display is my goal. But I am only interested in displaying  pdf or word files and the figures in these files with retina relocation I.e, they are more or less static display won't change often, and perhaps "acceleration" does not affect the application?

I am using a very good software that works only in El Capitan. Unfortunately the maker, for unknown reason,  is not interested in updating it to work in Sierra. And as a result, I have to use El Capitan until someone else can produce a software as good as the one I am currently using.

[dempson]

dlhotka wrote:

First, that software company needs to get current -  El Cap will no longer get security patches after High Sierra's released in October.

Agreed that the software needs to get current, but you're off by a year on the security updates. Apple supplies Security and Safari updates for the current and two preceding major versions of macOS.

Yosemite (10.10) will not get any further Security/Safari updates after High Sierra (10.13) is released in September (or maybe as late as October). El Capitan (10.11) will get security updates for one more year. Sierra (10.12) will get security updates for two more years. (The "Xprotect" mechanism for detecting known malware is still getting updates all the way back to Snow Leopard.)

westsoc wrote:

What does 3rd acceleration mean? And somehow windows guest is not subject to "3rd party acceleration"?

The issue is that recent versions of macOS (or OS X) use the 3D (three dimensional) capabilities of the graphics controller to support drawing standard parts of the graphic user interface. That means the user interface is slower when the operating system is running in a virtual machine than it would be if running natively. If your application needs to use the 3D graphics hardware it won't be able to do so, which prevents some applications from working in a macOS VM, and others which have optional use of the 3D graphics hardware will work but perform slower.

For Windows as a guest OS, VMware is able to support 3D acceleration, but this capability has not been implemented for a macOS guest.

If user interface performance isn't a significant concern, and the software itself doesn't require 3D graphics, that only leaves the question of whether El Capitan running as a guest in VMware would be able to drive the resolution of an LG 5K display, let alone two of them.

I don't have one of those displays (or anything similar) so can't test it myself, but my observation of an El Capitan guest in VMware on my 15-inch MacBook Pro with retina display is that the guest OS sees it as a standard display rather than a retina display: text is somewhat blurry and pixellated compared to text displayed by the host OS. In the case of a single LG 5K display (native resolution 5120 by 2880 pixels) I'd expect El Capitan in the VM running in full screen mode would see it as a non-retina display with resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels. That resolution is definitely within the capabilities of El Capitan.

There is a VMware Fusion setting to use the full resolution of the display, which results in the VM behaving like it has a 2560 by 1600 display on my 15-inch MacBook Pro: everything is half the normal size making text hard to read.

As to whether you can use two LG displays in the El Capitan VM: in full screen mode, the VM will occupy one of the displays and have no access to the other one. To use both displays I can think of two possibilties:

(a) Run two VMs at the same time, one in full screen mode on each display. Each VM would require its own installations of El Capitan and Paper, both of which would be running at the same time (possibly needing a second licence for Paper), both accessing the shared 500 GB folder on the host.

(b) Change a system setting (on the host OS) to turn off "Displays have separate spaces", and run the VM in a single window which you drag wide enough to span both displays. This would have some wasted screen space vertically due to the host OS menu bar, VM window title bar and toolbar (the toolbar can be hidden). I can test this with two somewhat lower resolution displays but I'll have to log out temporarily, so will reply again shortly.

[dempson]

(b) Change a system setting (on the host OS) to turn off "Displays have separate spaces", and run the VM in a single window which you drag wide enough to span both displays. This would have some wasted screen space vertically due to the host OS menu bar, VM window title bar and toolbar (the toolbar can be hidden). I can test this with two somewhat lower resolution displays but I'll have to log out temporarily, so will reply again shortly.

This seems to work: using my 15-inch MacBook Pro's internal display (effectively 1440 by 900) plus my external 24-inch display (1920 by 1200) I can drag the VM window wide enough to cover the full width of both displays, i.e. 3360 pixels wide. By dragging the window off the left edge, I can widen it further and got as far as 5200 pixels wide, which is wider than what you would need for two displays that are effectively 2560 pixels wide (5120 pixels total).

[westsoc]

Thank u for spending so much time to do experiments using Fusion in order to answer my questions. I truly appreciate everyone's time,sharing their  knowledge and giving me suggestions.

My problem is I do not have the technical knowledge to understand the replies.

However, from the replies  I sense that my question may have a solution. The question is : a Fusion guest window installed with an old version OS which has no driver for the LG 5K display, can the guest use the LG 5K driver of a newer version OS installed in the Fusion host?  The answer seems to be yes. Correct?

If the answer is yes, to clarify my understanding, please allow me to ask another question: if I buy a new Mac which is capable of using the full resolution of a single (not two) LG 5K display, and the Fusion setup is guest older OS has no LG 5K driver whereas the host newer OS does have the LG 5K driver, can the guest have full 5K resolution?

About 3D acceleration, I solely use Papers 3 to read and organize scientific literature in pdf and word format so don't  care about 3D. Have collected over twenty thousands published papers some with personal notes thus am a hostage to papers 3 and El Capitan, the required OS. My need for the LG 5K comes from I often have to open 10 papers on the screen in order to compare their ideas and results so I could grasp the contribution and true significance of each paper .

[ColoradoMarmot]

So the resolution situation is complicated - if the hardware can drive a 5K display (and El Cap era hardware is hit or miss on that), then it should work.  The question is if you'll have HDPI, which is Apple's way of scaling the user interface so it's not tiny.  And that's hard to say.

The 3D acceleration situation is also complicated.  Technically what's not supported is the GPU (graphical processing unit).  If the software uses components in the operating system that trigger that, you'll end up with black windows in the application - it simply won't display.

Honestly, we'll all just speculating and guessing as to what might or might not work.  In a case like this, the best thing to do it take advantage of the trial license for Fusion and give it a go.    If it works, then bob's your uncle - and that's the ideal way to run an out-of-date operating system anyway.

One note:  With that kind of data, you'll want to have a good backup strategy for the virtual machine.  The best, and only guaranteed to work method, is to shut down (not suspend) the Guest, then copy the entire VM bundle to an external drive.  Time Machine is *not* a good option.  Carbon Copy Cloner works great, as long as the guest is shut down when it runs.

P.S. To the poster above, where's the N-2 documented?  We're a very large mac (10's of thousands) shop, and N-1 is all that we reliably see patches for.  If that's changed, I'll pass it along 🙂

[dempson]

P.S. To the poster above, where's the N-2 documented?  We're a very large mac (10's of thousands) shop, and N-1 is all that we reliably see patches for.  If that's changed, I'll pass it along 🙂

Apple does not document their support policy for older OS X versions, but it is easily observed by seeing which updates are released and when they cease for older OS versions. I've been keeping track of this at least as far back as 10.3. Manual installers for past updates (apart from Safari) can be found at http://support.apple.com/downloads if you want to confirm the details.

From there it can be determined that Apple used to only support the preceding version with security updates, but once they moved to annual OS releases, the preceding two versions got security updates (Snow Leopard was the first version to benefit). Up to Snow Leopard, everything got security updates for about four years from introduction, which dropped to about three years for Lion and later.

Looking into my archive copies for quick reference (exact dates of security updates might be out by a day or two) we have:

10.3: introduced 2003-10-24, final security update "2007-008" dated 2007-11-14 (after the introduction of 10.5 by less than a month).

10.4: introduced 2005-04-29, final security update "2009-005" dated 2009-09-11 (after the introduction of 10.6 by less than a month).

10.5: introduced 2007-10-26, final full security update "2011-004" dated 2011-06-24 (before the introduction of 10.7 by about a month); also had a "2012-003" security update addressing one issue dated 2012-05-15.

10.6: introduced 2009-08-28, final security update "2013-004" dated 2013-09-13 (before the introduction of 10.9 by about a month - note the jump by one version).

10.7: introduced 2011-07-20, final security update "2014-004" dated 2014-09-20 (before the introduction of 10.10 by about a month).

10.8: introduced 2012-07-25, final security update "2015-006" dated 2015-08-14 (before the introduction of 10.11 by about two months).

10.9: introduced 2013-10-22, final security update "2016-004" dated 2016-07-16 (before the introduction of 10.12 by about two months).

10.10: introduced 2014-10-16, latest security update "2017-003" dated 2017-07-20, which is probably the final security update for Yosemite.

10.11: introduced 2015-09-30, latest security update "2017-003" dated 2017-07-20, expecting another year of security updates.

10.12: introduced 2016-09-20, latest minor version update 2017-07-20, which is probably the last minor version, expecting two years of security updates.

Safari updates have followed the same pattern in recent OS versions, but were less consistent in the 10.3 to 10.5 era.

[ColoradoMarmot]

That's what I thought.  As far as I know, there's no official commitment even to N-1, though they've been pretty good about that.  But have also noticed that critical security patches may or may not be backported - particularly to N-2.  It seems to be based on how much that particular component has changed - easy ones are, but design issues aren't.    It makes doing enterprise policies painful at best.

All this said, there's still no good reason for a vendor to lag support by more than a year (1st dev preview June/16).