A real hackintosh white zone
Hackintosh, running macOS on a non-Apple machine, has long been available on mainstream Intel configurations, and increasingly on AMD Ryzen chips. Except that there remained a white box, AMD EPYC server processorsthose who equip data centers. Choulant says he scoured the forums in seven languages without ever finding any verifiable success in bare metal, that is to say directly on the hardware and not in a virtual machine which would mask the difficulties. A VM success did exist, but no stable macOS desktop on bare EPYC. Hence its documented world-first formula.
Quarante boots
The machine is a Supermicro server motherboard, an EPYC Zen 2 “Rome” with 16 cores and 32 threads, a Radeon RX 6000, 64 GB of ECC memory and an NVMe, aimed at macOS Sequoia 15.7. Initially, nothing started. The kernel crashed so early that it didn’t even display its first log line. more than forty attemptsChoulant understood that the loader was trying to accommodate the kernel at a memory address already occupied by the card’s remote management firmware. A certain Michael “Micking” Perche also gave him a decisive hand on how to declare the processor to the system. All that remained was to activate SMT, the AMD equivalent of Intel’s Hyper-Threading, to go from the 16 threads seen by macOS to the actual 32, again without any documentation for EPYC.
A real workstation, but out of the ordinary
The most interesting thing is that the result holds up. The machine starts by itself, with the apple and the progress bar, and is used on a daily basis by the agency. In Geekbench 6, it displays 8207 points a multicÅ“ur and 1217 a simple cÅ“ura few percent above an equivalent EPYC under Linux or Windows, with an OpenCL graphics score around 89000, the level of a Mac Pro 2019, all publicly viewable. The Lens, a workstation tailored for Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photoshop. Choulant, on the other hand, refuses to publish his configuration, and reminds himself that all this tramples on Apple’s licensing agreement, which reserves macOS for in-house hardware only.
What do we say about it?
Technically, tinkering commands respect, and we love this kind of challenge undertaken just to prove that not done yet
does not mean impossible
. And you, would you try macOS on a server, or would you keep the Apple on the machine intended for it?
