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.

[DaveP]

Ventura and Sonoma both show the light grey screen when AppleGPU settings enabled. Basically it's broken and has been for sometime. Sonoma beta works fine without the Apple para-virtualised GPU but as we know it limits things regarding what can be displayed. Even with the AppleGPU enabled in Big Sur & Monterey some things never worked e.g. Maps could not display any graphics. I have tried using the Apple development kernels in the VM and host to see what is going on but no clues given as to the issue.

For info, the Apple para-virtualised GPU does not requires VMware tools as it is built into macOS.

I would caution anyone on even trying using AppleGPU as it can lock up the VMX process and the only way to stop the VM is to use the terminal and pkill command.

I mainly only run macOS in Fusion (Intel) and it is obvious those days are coming to an end. It is interesting to see that Apple are working on built-in support for virtualising Apple Silicon macOS. It's not perfect but certainly a start. 

[Piipperi]

Update as of 22.6.2023: After reinstalling VMware Tools and installing dev beta 2, Paravirtualized Graphics works again!

[gilby101]

> Update as of 22.6.2023: After reinstalling VMware Tools and installing dev beta 2, Paravirtualized Graphics works again!

So it does!!!! That's a surprise.

I started again with a new VM, installed VMware Tools (twice). Then enabled paravirtualised graphics and all seems good.

[jerryfrit]

This is an old thread, but I'm jumping in because no one yet had reported success with a Fusion 13 Sonoma guest on Intel.  It took a while, but I have.  This was in Beta 3, and I've since updated successfully to Beta 4.

The host is an iMac Pro, on Ventura 13.4.1 at the time (now 13.5.).  I started with a copy of my Ventura (beta profile) VM, and switched it to the Sonoma track.  Initial efforts failed with a freeze during the install process.  Adding the Device Support package did not help.

Success was had after throwing a ton of resources at it.  I increased the VMs drive space from 80 to 100 GB (my VMs are on a 2TB external SSD.)  With 32GB RM available on the machine, I upped the VMs RAM from 8GB to 12.

Also, from a tip on another thread, I edited the VMX to add 'smc.version = "0" '

Some combination of this did the trick for me.

To update to Beta 4, I also updated the Device Support.  I do not know whether that was necessary.  The performance of the Sonoma VM seems nominal.

[jerryfrit]

(Future Jerry)

Don't know why I'm not being allowed to edit my post, but I see that I missed some newer comments.  Nevertheless, I hope my information is useful to someone. 🙂

[gilby101]

> Also, from a tip on another thread, I edited the VMX to add 'smc.version = "0" '

I didn't know that one. And didn't need it.  What does it do?

But (see my earlier posts) I did need the svga.present="FALSE" and appleGPU0.present="TRUE" to enable paravirtualised graphics. Did you?

Mine runs pretty well though it is only for simple testing.  I will do more as we closer to a final version.

[bkomanet]

Or abandoning the Apple Mac platform all together.  The five Mac Pro's (2019) we have are our last.  My company/school are moving to Linux computers for virtualization.

[colin519]

Thank you for this! This lets me get another guest OS version out of my Mac Pro 2019 as far as development goes. It was very janky but did boot for me after I installed without adding the Apple GPU stuff to the vmx file. Everything is nice and smooth on my 16c/48/4TB/16GB W5700X run 14.1.

I get why Apple has gone to Apple Silicon but I really do like my Mac Pro. It was expensive but it's also the last expandable Mac from Apple, and it will natively boot Windows 10/11 and its run my whole business for a few years already.

Hopefully someone at VMware keeps this alive at least as long as Apple provides support.