If you have been looking for imformation about virtualizing LEopard or Snow Leopard, you’ll probably stumble upon this two sites, which contain most of the useful information. However, when it comes to Snow Leopard, information is spread across hundreds of posts, and most of it is for MS Windows only.

There’s another attempt using empire-efi here, which didn’t worked for me.

I just wrote a guide myself about how to get Snow Leopard working under Ubuntu 9.10 and Virtualbox 3.1.6r59338 and I was about to post it. However, I found another guide, for windows, which will work flawlessly under Linux with some minor tweaks, and has step-by-step screenshots, so I guess there’s no need to duplicate the content there.

Here’s exactly what I did to get things working:

First you need, a Leopard OsX86 working virtualbox machine. To get Leopard working, download any OsX86 distro and install it following this guide. I used iDeneb 1.6 and worked fine.

You DO NOT need to patch the VirtualBox files in order to get Leopard working, so just create the VM without applying any patch.

The only difference you’ll find is that under Linux, the required file to edit will be(assuming you named the virtual machine LeoVM) :
/home/your_user_name/.Virtualbox/Machines/LeoVM/LeoVM.xml

Then, there you can add the required line:

<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal2/SupportExtHwProfile" value="on"/>

The Leopard installation should go without a problem, and boot fine. Everything you need to know is on the guide I linked before.

Now the tricky part. Install Snow Leopard.

You should use this guide. It is really detailed and easy to follow. I used a retail SnowLeopard 10.6.3 image, and worked perfect for me. However, since the guide is for windows, you’ll need to take into account the following changes:

When you create the machine for Snow Leopard (page 13 of the guide), you need to edit the file (assuming you named the VM SnowLeoVM) :

/home/your_user_name/.Virtualbox/Machines/SnowLeoVM/SnowLeoVM.xml

and add ONLY the following lines:

<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal2/Devices/e1000f/0/Trusted" value="integer:1"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal2/SupportExtHwProfile" value="on"/>

Now we need to patch the Virtual Machine files. The thing is that we need support for SS3 instructions, and ACPI v.14 which is not supported by default in Virtualbox 3.1.x. If you’re using the OSE edition, you can patch the source and recompile the whole thing. However, if you’re using the standard edition, you’ll need to binary-patch the files.

You can find more information about the patches in the comments section in this post. SOME of the info is not correct, and some other is incomplete, so be careful and read everything before doing any patch. I am using the GHex to patch them.

The files to patch are:
/usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxDD2.so
Every occurence of : 11 00 05 00
Changed for : 14 00 05 00

/usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxDD2GC.gc
Every occurence of : 11 00 05 00
Changed for : 14 00 05 00

/usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxDD2R0.r0
Every occurence of : 11 00 05 00
Changed for : 14 00 05 00

/usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxVMM.so
Every occurence of: 04 C5 01 00 00 00 31 C9
Changed for: 04 C5 01 02 00 00 31 C9


I am providing the files for VirtualBox 3.1.6.r59338 HERE. Just run the patch or unpatch scripts to do the job, or open them to take a look at the files that will be copied and do it manually.

And that’s it.  You should have a Snow Leopard VM working fine. In the guide I provided you have explained how to solve the video resolution problem, which is pretty straightforward.

The network works fine, but you need to set up the static ip address for the interface, and connect/disconnect cable from the Virtualbox menu to get it working. The rest works fine. Of course it will not fly, but it is enough to try the iphone SDK under linux.