I have been bothering the VM team for years for VM GPU pass through. I worked on the Apple Silicon Mac Pro and it would have made way more sense if you could run a linux VM and pass through the GPU that goes inside the case!

Sadly, as you can tell, they have not taken me up on my requests. Awesome that other people got it working!

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m132 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It looks like the pass through part here was implemented using standard DriverKit interfaces, if I'm not mistaken. That is, the PCIe BAR can already be mapped from the user-space, without any extra modifications to macOS. It's just a matter of VMMs, such as QEMU, adopting this interface in addition to Linux VFIO and the like (unless you're talking about Virtualization.framework, which is kind of a VMM of its own).

What exactly do you feel like macOS is missing?

	▲	anp 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I’m not very familiar with the specifics of pass through but IIUC only being able to map 1.5gb of active DMA buffers at a time is pretty limiting.

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caycep 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What are the chances there will be another Mac Pro in the future?

Will Apple ever make a computer that makes Siracusa happy? (and do you have the "Believe" shirt?)

	▲	kahrl 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's been a LOOOONG time since final cut pro was a killer app. In the foreseeable future, they will be selling TokTok machines to illiterates with dopamine problems. Highly doubt.

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crdrost an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It feels like half the problem in this blog post is dealing with memory access issues induced by QEMU and the VM boundary... it's probably something dumb I'm missing, but if you boot up Ubuntu in Docker, wouldn't the NVIDIA drivers still load? And then you wouldn't have to fight Apple about the memory management because OSX would still own the memory?

	▲	swiftcoder an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> but if you boot up Ubuntu in Docker, wouldn't the NVIDIA drivers still load? Even if the drivers loaded, they can't talk to the GPU from within docker (unless one implements PCI passthrough). MacOS owns the PCI bus in this scenario.
	▲	smw 21 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		docker on macos runs in a linux vm
	▲	jmalicki an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The driver wants to own the memory is the problem.

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brcmthrowaway an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I still believe the lack of NVIDIA GPU support in the Mac Pro will go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in tech.

Anyway, the Mac Pro is dead now. There's only so much sales audio and video professionals can provide.

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Aurornis an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> I still believe the lack of NVIDIA GPU support in the Mac Pro will go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in tech.

I don’t know about that. Apple supported some full size GPUs in past product lines and the number of users was very small. Granted, LLMs change that demand but the audience for Mac Pro buyers who would use a full-size GPU that is impossible to obtain is almost nothing compared to their laptop sales.

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bigyabai an hour ago | parent [-]

The audience for Mac Pro buyers is almost nothing, full stop. It failed to find a niche, and now Apple is getting rid of it: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/26/apple-discontinues-mac-...

Part of the reason the new Mac Pro failed to find an audience can definitely be blamed on macOS' hostility to third party hardware. Who knows what Apple would be worth if they beat Nvidia's Grace CPU to the datacenter market. It was certainly their opportunity.

	▲	brcmthrowaway 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		True, they could do any number of things. But a datacenter play would appear quite random to investors and their core audience. Broadcom + Nvidia however...

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jbverschoor an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I guess that little problem with the Nvidia chips overheating in the MacBook Pro didn’t give Apple a lot of confidence

	▲	bigyabai 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The Mac Pro isn't a Macbook Pro. It has socketed PCI slots and should be able to support the user's hardware in macOS' software, regardless of how Apple feels.