VMware Fusion 13 & macOS Sonoma guests's Paravirtualized Graphics support

[Piipperi]

Has anyone experimented with Fusion 13.0.2's settings, and found a workaround for getting Paravirtualized Graphics to work with Sonoma guests?

For me, it's mostly giving a gray screen, but on one session I was able to get a boot screen and use cmd + v for verbose mode, booting seemed to get stuck at some kind of CPU power management thing.

I tried installing Apple's Device Support package for Sonoma guests, but it didn't seem to make a difference. I'm on Intel though, and the update could have been rather intended for Apple Silicon and/or Apple's own virtualization software.

Other than the Paravirtualized Graphics not working though, I was able to get the beta booted without graphics acceleration enabled.

Maybe there's a VMware Fusion beta that I need to install for better compatibility, but I can't seem to find anything regarding a new tech preview.

[ColoradoMarmot]

I have no idea what paravirtualized means.

MacOS guests on Intel have only standard graphics support - no 3d acceleration. 

That's unlikely to change.  MacOS Guest VMWare tools development has ended - you've got what you've got.

[Piipperi]

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/paravirtualizedgraphics

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/81657 

This was working perfectly fine on macOS 13.5 beta too, so it's not like VMware Fusion 13 doesn't support it at all.

[Technogeezer]

I assume you're enabling the 3d graphics support by editing the .vmx file per https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/81657.

One question I have is what Mac are you using with Fusion 13?

Given that Sonoma is hot off the presses, I wouldn't be surprised if things didn't work with a Sonoma guest in the current Fusion releases. Apple isn't terribly forthcoming about under-the-hood changes. I would suspect that Sonoma changes something that the 3D support Fusion provides doesn't know about.  I'd give VMware a little time to shake things out, or continue to run with non-accelerated graphics.

Personally, I'd run any beta of Sonoma on Apple Silicon Macs using UTM (which uses Apple's high level virtualization framework).

This is the time of year that VMware tends to release "tech previews" or as we know it "public betas" of the next Fusion release. We hear rumors that we might see one in the not-too-distant future. I'd wait for that to really shake out Sonoma, and then report any findings through that.

Note however that support for macOS virtualization has been dwindling within VMware. They have deprecated support for macOS in ESXi. Vmware has also stated that they aren't going to support future macOS versions for ESXi.

It's unclear how much that applies to Fusion but I would not hold out hope for enhancements that will make Sonoma run "better" on Intel Macs. As an example, the VMware Tools are developed by the same team that builds them for all of VMware's products, and the macOS tools development has stopped.

If the current tools work fine in (without switching to the paravirt graphics), then that's probably what you'll get in Sonoma. Unless @Mikero (Fusion product manager) can convince them otherwise and enhance the paravirt support for the next Fusion release.

[ColoradoMarmot]

VMWare stated in another thread that they aren't spending any time or effort on Intel Mac guests going forward.

That feature has always been finicky and prone to breakage.  I'd call it experimental at best.  No surprise that Sonoma broke it again.

[Piipperi]

Do you have a link to the thread? That seems very unlikely for them to say that they'd entirely stop supporting macOS Guests on specifially Intel. Apple only last week upgraded the Mac Pro to Apple Silicon, and the 7,1 Mac Pro is still used for virtualization at schools and other enterprise markets. Although, that could just be via Anka or something else nowadays.

[Piipperi]

I'd love to use UTM too, but last time I used it, it only supported Apple's virtualization stuff on Apple Silicon, and not on Intel. So it was really slow when I tried it...

[ColoradoMarmot]

Esxi has depreciated MacOS tools, so there's no further development on them.  Without current tools, there's little that Fusion can do.  MacOS virtualization has always been a niche use case.

Until Esxi runs on ARM, and there's a market for Mac OS guests, for it, that won't change.  That's why it's intel specific.

[Technogeezer]

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@Piipperi wrote:

Do you have a link to the thread? That seems very unlikely for them to say that they'd entirely stop supporting macOS Guests on specifially Intel. Apple only last week upgraded the Mac Pro to Apple Silicon, and the 7,1 Mac Pro is still used for virtualization at schools and other enterprise markets. Although, that could just be via Anka or something else nowadays.

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https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/88697

And to date Fusion does not support any macOS virtualization on Apple Silicon. It is unclear if VMware will add support for virtualizing macOS on Apple Silicon like Parallels does. To me, it's a non-issue because I can virtualize macOS on Apple Silicon for free with the same feature sets as Parallels provides by using UTM. 

The experience running macOS as a VM on Apple Silicon is dramatically different than with Intel Macs. UTM is using Apple's high level virtualization platform for Monterey and later macOS versions.  That means that Monterey and later run native Apple Silicon/ARM versions and not Intel versions under emulation. They run a lot faster than those versions that need Intel CPU emulation.

The real pain point is for those users that want to run versions of macOS that only run on Intel Macs. As Apple phases out support of Intel Macs, it's going to become increasingly difficult to run those older macOS versions. You'll have to use second-hand Intel Macs in the not-too-distant future to run old macOS versions.

Decisions are going to have to be made, and it may involve having to depart from those old software versions and move on.to something new. 

[gilby101]

The OP is asking about Fusion on Intel. The future of Fusion on Apple silicon is interesting, but not what the OP is wanting.

I too have a Sonoma guest on my Intel Mac.  It runs surprisingly well up to a point. The point being that some window server actions (e.g. minimising a window) are excruciatingly slow - the vm 'hangs' and clock stops ticking for in some case many minutes.

I tried the trick for the Ventura betas which was to add

svga.present="FALSE"
appleGPU0.present="TRUE"

to enable paravirtualised graphics.

With Sonoma this causes a hang part way through the boot process.

Do you know a way of enabling paravirtualised graphics for Sonoma clients on Intel?

ps. Parallels has similar issue https://forum.parallels.com/threads/macos-14-x-sonoma-beta.360596/ though in my experiments the 'hang' when minimising windows was a few seconds rather than minutes.

[ColoradoMarmot]

That's the only way I know of, and if it doesn't work, it's likely to never work - VMWare is no longer working on support for MacOS intel guests.

[Technogeezer]

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@ColoradoMarmot wrote:

That's the only way I know of, and if it doesn't work, it's likely to never work - VMWare is no longer working on support for MacOS intel guests.

---

I wouldn't say "never" but unless @Mikero can convince folks otherwise to spend time on investigating what Apple changed in Sonoma and modifying the Apple GPU support, it's unlikely to happen.

My guess is that a future version of macOS will be unusable in Fusion once the last of the non-T2 Macs falls off macOS support. Sonoma will in my mind be the last macOS release that even has a chance of running under Fusion because Fusion does not emulate a T2 chip. To me, that does not bode well for VMware's willingness to put more effort into macOS Intel virtual machines.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Found the reference: https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Fusion-Discussions/VMWare-Fusion-won-t-install-VMWare-Tools...

Specifically:

"macOS Guests on Intel are not something we're continuing to support or address bugs with. "

[Technogeezer]

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@ColoradoMarmot wrote:

Found the reference: https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Fusion-Discussions/VMWare-Fusion-won-t-install-VMWare-Tools...

Specifically:

"macOS Guests on Intel are not something we're continuing to support or address bugs with. "

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I can hear the footsteps of people moving to Parallels as we speak....

[ColoradoMarmot]

Yep, all three of them ;-).

Seriously, I can't blame the Fusion team for it.  With esxi dropping the tool development effort, they really don't have much of an option.  It was more important years ago than recently, though I know people were using it to keep Mojave around rather than upgrading apps.  It's been long enough now that it really is time to change out those workloads.

And given resource constraints, it makes a ton more sense to work on Windows 11 support on ARM than Mac on Intel.  Besides, there's likely no more than 2 more OS versions that'll have Intel support at all.

[Technogeezer]

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@ColoradoMarmot wrote:

Yep, all three of them ;-).

Seriously, I can't blame the Fusion team for it.  With esxi dropping the tool development effort, they really don't have much of an option.  It was more important years ago than recently, though I know people were using it to keep Mojave around rather than upgrading apps.  It's been long enough now that it really is time to change out those workloads.

And given resource constraints, it makes a ton more sense to work on Windows 11 support on ARM than Mac on Intel.  Besides, there's likely no more than 2 more OS versions that'll have Intel support at all.

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Also reading between the lines of things that @Mikero has said publicly over the last year, it seems to me that VMware's world view is to use the desktop virtualization platforms as development platforms feeding into their enterprise hypervisor, containerization, and cloud offerings. That's the world of Linux and Windows.

That's not the macOS world. That's also not the world of running old, vendor-deprecated/unsupported versions of operating systems. 

If that's indeed their world view, then I can see them saying "well, if those things still work, good for you". But they're not going out of their way to actively court/position/develop the desktop virtualization product for those markets.

[gilby101]

It seems no one has attempted to answer your question with practical help, preferring to get into a general discussion about VMware's support for Fusion.

I too would be interested in help running Somona guest on Intel.

[Technogeezer]

Apologies for the diversion.

My point is that Sonoma is very, very new and obviously something has changed in it that doesn't work with VMware's "paravirt" macOS  graphics. Right now it doesn't appear that anyone has found a "magic incantation" yet that will get it to work. And it's not outside the realm of possibility that a future beta update from Apple might fix the issue. 

Not to say that someone won't find a way to get it to work, but I would be prepared for the possibility that it may never work. It's very possible that "fixing" the issue might require code changes on VMware's part that they've said they're not interested in doing.

[gilby101]

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@Technogeezer wrote:

Not to say that someone won't find a way to get it to work, but I would be prepared for the possibility that it may never work. It's very possible that "fixing" the issue might require code changes on VMware's part that they've said they're not interested in doing.

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You may well be right. If nobody has an answer now, it may never happen. Parallels also has a similar problem (as well as crashing the vm!), but from the thread on their support forum there is an expectation that it will be fixed by Parallels. All due (probably) to changes to Metal.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Exactly.  If it is something that would require code changes, which is likely, I wouldn’t expect it to happen.  

even with Parallels, the clock is ticking.  On the current path, within two years, macos will drop support - and guaranteed security patches - for intel machines.  Two years after that, even best effort back ports end.  Folks reliant on ancient macos software, or any other intel specific guests, should start looking to migrate to current solutions.