Here’s my script to get kmutil to generate an arm64e kext collection.

To create a boot kext collection, macOS 11 introduces the kmutil tool. Like the iOS kernelcache, it contains all Kexts required for booting, so the bootloader only needs to load it into memory and jump into it. MacOS 11 uses an evolved version of this format, called the Boot Kext Collection. On iOS, the kernel and its Kexts are packed together into a bootable file called the Kernel Cache. This will never be a Time Train: only a science experiment. I researched this this not because it’ll be practical, but only to understand how an Apple Silicon Mac works. Besides, Hackintoshes are often built when Apple’s own hardware isn’t fast enough in this case, Apple’s ARM processors are already some of the fastest in the industry. as for Hackintosh: macOS uses CPU instructions that aren’t available yet on non-Apple ARM CPUs, so you can’t have hardware accelerated virtualization, only very slow emulation.

Not useful for software dev: QEMU’s CPU emulation doesn’t support Apple Silicon-specific features, such as Rosetta’s memory ordering or the APRR JIT.Apple Silicon Macs already support kernel debugging. Emulating iOS is useful for security research when jailbreak is not available.This approach will help with none of these: There are only three reasons I can think of for emulating macOS: security research, software development without a real Apple Silicon machine, and Hackintoshing. Most importantly, even if I ever managed to fully boot the macOS kernel, emulating macOS is useless anyways.This will never boot anything close to graphical macOS UI.Userspace is instead borrowed from iOS 14 b3.Absolutely nothing is supported: literally only the kernel and the serial port works, not even the userspace since there’s no disk driver.And the macOS kernel will boot into launchd.

Apple virtualization vs qemu