macOS virtual machine from scratch (August 6, 2023)

macos-guest-virtualbox.sh is a Bash script for creating Catalina (10.15), Mojave (10.14), and High Sierra (10.13) guests on VirtualBox on Windows, Linux, and macOS hosts from scratch

The script creates a VirtualBox guest macOS virtual machine with unmodified macOS installation files downloaded directly from Apple servers. See the readme file for more information.

Known issues

• Guest macOS boot process hangs on “LoadKernelFromStream”, “EndRandomSeed”, or "EXITBS" - see documentation regarding VirtualBox CPU profiles and CPUID settings.
• Hosts with CPUs released in 2020 and later may fail to start or complete the installer, and may require manually adjusting the CPUID settings.
• The script does not verify file integrity for the downloaded installation files.

Dependencies

The following dependencies should be available through a package manager:
bash coreutils gzip unzip wget xxd dmg2img virtualbox

The following optional packages provide optical character recognition that reduces the required interaction with the script:
tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-eng

Supported versions:

• VirtualBox ≥ 6.1.6, though versions as low as 5.2 may work.
• GNU Bash ≥ 4.3, GNU coreutils ≥ 8.22, GNU gzip ≥ 1.5, Info-ZIP unzip ≥ v6.0, GNU wget ≥ 1.14, xxd with -e little endian support, dmg2img ≥ 1.6.5, tesseract-ocr ≥ 4