Installing Arch Linux on Mac Hypervisor

Situation

So you love your shiny Apple build quality computers, but you also love telling people "I use Arch btw".

Solution: Install Arch Linux via xhyve and then remote into it via NoMachine.

THIS IS A GENERAL GUIDE ASSUMING A LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY BECAUSE THIS IS OVERKILL.

Steps:

Prerequisites:

• You're going to need Homebrew (go google that I'm not telling you)
• Arch Linux ISO

brew install xhyve

• Make a directory you're going to do this in

mkdir Arch

• Wacky work around for making the ISO useable for you

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/tmp.iso bs=$[4*1024] count=1                                               

• Write the ISO into this tmp.iso

dd if=/Your/Download/Path/archlinux-2020.02.01-x86_64.iso bs=$[4*1024] skip=1 >> tmp.iso

• Mount the tmp.iso you just made

hdiutil attach /tmp/tmp.iso

• Now you need two files, vmlinuz and archiso.img so you are going to copy them into your Arch dir you made earlier. (Your ARCH_202002 might be different)

cd Arch
cp /Volumes/ARCH_202002/arch/boot/x86_64/vmlinuz .
cp /Volumes/ARCH_202002/arch/boot/x86_64/archiso.img .

• Create a HD for the guest operating system. Adjust from 50G to whatever you want.

mkfile -n 50G Arch.img

• Generate a UUID

uuidgen

Now paste into a start.sh file this script.
Remember to

• replace with the output of uuidgen.
• set the path to the ARCH iso in IMG_CD
• Set archisolabel=

(also chmod +x it)

KERNEL="vmlinuz"
INITRD="archiso.img"
CMDLINE="earlyprintk=serial console=ttyS0 root=<UUID> archisobasedir=arch archisolabel=ARCH_202002 rw loglevel=3 quiet"

MEM="-m 4G" #RAM
SMP="-c 2" #NUMBEROFCORES
NET="-s 2:0,virtio-net"
IMG_CD="-s 3,ahci-cd,/THE/PATH/TO/archlinux-2020.02.01-x86_64.iso"
IMG_HDD="-s 4,virtio-blk,Arch.img"
PCI_DEV="-s 0:0,hostbridge -s 31,lpc"
LPC_DEV="-l com1,stdio"
ACPI="-A"
UUID="-U <UUID>"

xhyve $ACPI $MEM $SMP $PCI_DEV $LPC_DEV $NET $IMG_CD $IMG_HDD $UUID -f kexec,$KERNEL,$INITRD,"$CMDLINE"

Run the script with sudo (you need it for networking) and go through your normal install procedure using the hard drive is located at /dev/vda
create a /boot /dev/vda1 of type vfat (type W95 FAT b) and your / in /dev/vda2

add the virtio_blk to /etc/mkinitcpio.conf

MODULES=(virtio_blk)

Right before you quit you are going to want to copy two files off.

Now get an SSH server going so you can SCP two files off.

scp root@192.168.64.5:/mnt/boot/initramfs-linux.img .
scp root@192.168.64.5:/mnt/boot/vmlinuz-linux .
scp root@192.168.64.5:/mnt/boot/grub/grub.cfg .

Armed with these new files make a new script called run.sh (or edit the old one)

Look into the grub.cfg file to find any extra cmdline arguments you might need.

KERNEL="vmlinuz-linux"
INITRD="initramfs-linux.img"
CMDLINE="earlyprintk=serial console=ttyS0 root=<UUID> archisobasedir=arch archisolabel=ARCH_202002 rw loglevel=3 quiet"

MEM="-m 4G"
SMP="-c 2"
NET="-s 2:0,virtio-net"
IMG_HDD="-s 4,virtio-blk,Arch.img"
PCI_DEV="-s 0:0,hostbridge -s 31,lpc"
LPC_DEV="-l com1,stdio"
ACPI="-A"
UUID="-U <UUID>

# shellcheck disable=SC2086
xhyve $ACPI $MEM $SMP $PCI_DEV $LPC_DEV $NET $IMG_CD $IMG_HDD $UUID -f kexec,$KERNEL,$INITRD,"$CMDLINE"

As some final steps, install NoMachine, i3-gaps, Nerd Fonts (Fira Code variant obviously) and use NoMachine to RDP into your shiny new VM!