OS/2 and OPENSTEP in emulation on Apple silicon

[mbert]

I am a lover of exotic and legacy operating systems, and after I got my Apple silicon MBP one thing on my todo list was rescuing my favourite VMs after they could no longer be executed on VMWare Fusion.

I converted the disk images to qcow2 format, created VMs, took over the settings from the old VMs, imported the new disk images and went for it. This worked fine with VMs of more recent OSes, like Haiku OS. However I got stuck with OS/2 and OPENSTEP:

OPENSTEP (4.2) tells me "OPENSTEP boot1 v40.13.1" but gets stuck there. No error message, simply silence.

OS/2 Warp Server 4 went into errors when booting until I selected an older hardware profile. After having reset the display configuration I now boot into OS/2 in VGA. Now however I lose mouse and keyboard almost immediately and don't get them back.

It looks like both OSes have problems with the emulated hardware. I have no clue where to go from here. Is there any way to debug what it is doing? Are there any tweaks in the settings I can try? Are the problems maybe even know, i.e. the keyboard problem with OS2?

I guess now as Apple silicon is getting more popular more and more people will change from other virtualisation solutions to UTM since it allows to continue running existing x86-based VMs. I have some hope that maybe I am not the only one playting with these exotic OSes?

[mbert]

Finally got OS/2 running. Hoping that it will be of interest to others:

I tried through many machine profiles, in the end pc-i440fx-6.2 worked.

Networkadapter: pcnet
Networking: bridged

Display: cirrus-vga
Display driver: SDD (using the "gen" driver rather than the "sdd" driver), so got 1024x768 resolution, not great but good enough

[tifasoftware]

you can also just search up QEMU Openstep and figure it out from there.

[tifasoftware]

To install nextstep you have to set the SCSI adapter to the and am53c974, but you can't unless utm implants a SCSI device picker.

[mbert]

I was eventually unsuccessful with OPENSTEP. From what I had found out there would have been too many things necessary to do, including even patching qemu. Getting it to run in 86box was rather straightforward. See this thread: https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=4741.0

[melvinlusk]

Did you ever have any luck with this? I can't get past the OS2LVM error when booting. I've tried multiple different hardware profiles, as well as different version of OS/2.

[mbert]

I got OS/2 WarpServer 4.0 running, see above. I did not try any other version.

[melvinlusk]

I had success with OS/2 Warp 4.52 Server. Here's the settings I used...there may be others that work, but I haven't had a chance to try every single combination. For an option that's not listed, use the default setting.

Anyone know how to add multiple CPUs to OS/2? I have SMP installed.

Architecture = i386 (x86)
System = Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996) (pc-i440fx-6.2)
Memory = 512 MB
CPU = Pentium2
Cores = 2 (
OS/2 doesn't accept this, even though I have SMP enabled.
I think it needs two sockets instead of cores...anyone know how to do this in UTM?)
Force MultiCore = Y
RNG Device = Y
Force PS/2 Controller = Y
USB Support = disabled
Emulated Display Card = Cirrus CLGD 54xx VGA (cirrus-vga)
Add a serial port, otherwise OS/2 will throw erros with COM.SYS when booting. Choose the defaults.
Network Mode = Bridged (Advanced)
Bridged Interface = Automatic
Emulated Network Card = pcnet
Emulated Audio Card = Creative Sound Blaster 16 (sb16)
Add a floppy drive.
Also add an IDE CD/DVD drive if you're installing from a CD ISO.
Hard drive should use an IDE interface.