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phaer/nixos-vm-on-macos

Run #NixOS on darwin, including Rosetta 2 & virtiofs!
Source code at GitHub null
phaer/nixos-vm-on-macos.json
{
  "createdAt": "2025-01-11T17:11:19Z",
  "defaultBranch": "main",
  "description": "Run #NixOS on darwin, including Rosetta 2 & virtiofs!",
  "fullName": "phaer/nixos-vm-on-macos",
  "homepage": null,
  "language": "Nix",
  "name": "nixos-vm-on-macos",
  "pushedAt": "2025-07-23T13:56:36Z",
  "stargazersCount": 24,
  "topics": [],
  "updatedAt": "2025-10-06T10:14:14Z",
  "url": "https://github.com/phaer/nixos-vm-on-macos"
}

NixOS VM on macOS

Section titled “NixOS VM on macOS”

This repository contains code to build and run NixOS in virtual machines on macOS. It uses vfkit as qemu doesn’t support apple´s virtualisation framework, and UTM isn’t as easy to configure from nix expressions.

It is currently not much more than a quick weekend hack and therefore experimental, neither stable nor feature-complete - but fun & promising!

Usage

Section titled “Usage”

To start a graphical, rather minimal VM run:

Terminal window
$ nix run .\#nixosConfigurations.minimal-vm.config.system.build.vm -L

Share Files

Section titled “Share Files”

The local (currently empty) directory persistent gets mounted to /persistent in the guest via `virtio-fs“.

Get the IP

Section titled “Get the IP”

minimal-vm has a static mac address defined in virtualisation.macAddress, which can be used to derive its ipv6 link local address. A legacy ipv4 address can be acquired by parsing /var/db/dhcpd_leases. A helper script to do both is included in this repository:

Terminal window
$ nix run .\#get-vm-ip -- minimal-vm
fe80::f425:e2ff:fe48:581e%bridge100
$ nix run .\#get-vm-ip -- minimal-vm -4
192.168.64.2

Enable the GUI

Section titled “Enable the GUI”

Set virtualisation.graphics = true; in configuration.nix.

Builder VM

Section titled “Builder VM”

There’s a proof-of-concept implementation of nix-darwins pkgs.linux-builder, based on vfkit and therefore able to use rosetta.

You can start it with

Terminal window
nix run .\#nixosConfigurations.builder-vm.config.system.build.macos-builder-installer -L

But it might interfere with already running linux-builders. It doesn’t listen on a high port, as upstream does. Instead its local IP is fully routed. A patched, not yet upstreamed, nix-darwin fork to allow setting a custom host & port for the builder is available at: https://github.com/nix-darwin/nix-darwin/pull/1459

What works

Section titled “What works”
  • Booting a closure, directly from kernel and initrd.
  • Mounting host file systems via virtio-fs. Used for a writable overlay over the hosts nix store by default (see [hosts/minimal-vm]!(./hosts/minimal-vm)
  • Alternatively, a read-only erofs image with your boot closure and an optional writable overlay in a separate disk image. Those should eventually become a single image. See [hosts/builder-vm]!(./hosts/builder-vm)
  • Rosetta - by leveraging vfkit´s and NixOS´ Rosetta integrations you can build derivations for both aarch64-linux and x86_64-linux in the VM.
  • Bridged networking via virto-net.
  • Graphical mode with virtio-gpu. vfkit´s GUI seems to be still limited though, e.g. no copy & paste support(?).

What needs work

Section titled “What needs work”
  • VM Tests with our vfkit VMs would be awesome.
  • CI tests for the builds would be awesome.
  • Same for a release pipeline to pre-build images.
  • This list: There’s much to explore & still a bit to clean-up.