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pmj
virtio-net-osx
C++2012–2016
pmj / virtio-net-osx

virtio-net-osx

Mac OS X driver for a (virtualised) "virtio" network device. Virtio network devices are supported by KVM and VirtualBox. Fastest virtual network device for VirtualBox OSX Guests, allows kernel debugging of guests via gdb.

2Distinct people
2Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
251GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Mac OS X driver for a (virtualised) "virtio" network device. Virtio network devices are supported by KVM and VirtualBox. Fastest virtual network device for VirtualBox OSX Guests, allows kernel debugging of guests via gdb.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year2 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2012-03-28 12:47:29 UTC to 2016-09-22 13:56:00 UTC.

012012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

2 sources
AFAIK the only way to achieve this is to pass-through a GPU via VT-d. This config does not appear to support this though. If you search github for this line, you will find other configs that support doing this- https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM/blob/master/macOS-libvirt.... Edit: It's relatively easy- blacklist (or uninstall) GPU drivers from host machine, and pass the PCI address to qemu. Performance is not perceptibly different from native. Other things you probably want to do are enable hugepages, pin virtual cpus to physical cores, and use vfio for network- https://github.com/pmj/virtio-net-osx. It's also possible to run boot OSX using UEFI mode, which removes the need for the binary blobs in this repo.
In OS X-KVM: Running Mac OS X El Capitan on KVM and QEMU
I think it's a requirement of PCIe for devices to support DMA to memory with 64-bit physical addresses.[1] In any case, the hardware clearly supports it in the case - the bug was that a 32-bit I/O vector was being passed off to the hardware claiming to be a 64-bit one, and subsequently interpreted as such. The situation was certainly bad with classic PCI - I have an nForce5-based motherboard whose PCI bus silently truncates 64-bit DMA buffer addresses to 32 bits. The onboard ethernet chip does in principle support 64-bit DMA, so I was getting all sorts of weird behaviour after upgrading my RAM from 2 to 6 GiB. The southbridge chip in question is now blacklisted for 64-bit DMA in the Linux kernel. The 32-bit DMA cutoff isn't the only such constraint on buffer physical addresses of course; historically, ISA devices could only DMA to 20-bit
Read the rest
addresses IIRC (or was it 24 bits?). I wrote an OS X driver for the virtio paravirtual ethernet adapter a while back[2] and its I/O buffers must be 4K page-aligned (low 12 bits 0), and its high bits are specified by a 32-bit number. This means you can only use buffers with physical addresses which fit in 44 bits. That's 16TiB, which are probably still a way off but could conceivably be reached not too far in the future. Current x86_64 CPUs certainly support 48 bit physical addresses in principle. [1] That doesn't mean hardware bugs don't exist, but at least it's part of the basic spec now, as opposed to being tagged on later as for PCI. [2] http://github.com/pmj/virtio-net-osx
In Hunting deep-seeded kernel bugs

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