Virtualized performance counters are apparently no longer possible on macOS Big Sur

[tbodt]

Is there any possibility of rr working in any way in a VM on Big Sur? It seems virtualized performance counters are no longer supported?

[rocallahan]

I haven't touched a Mac for years and neither has Kyle AFAIK so some Mac user will have to investigate this. To be clear, which hypervisor are you talking about?

[tbodt]

VMWare. In fairness I haven't tried others.

[jryans]

AFAICT, the other VM platforms never supported virtualised performance counters. As I understand it, macOS Big Sur no longer allows the kernel extensions VMWare used for advanced features like this, and instead they must only use Apple's user level Hypervisor framework, and I assume it doesn't support performance counters. I believe that means waiting for Apple to possible add such a feature in the future, and who knows if that will ever happen (esp. given the developer market doesn't seem that important to them). 😓

[tbodt]

Gotcha, so I have to turn off SIP and patch/force the VMWare kext to load. Might try that sometime

[GitMensch]

Gotcha, so I have to turn off SIP and patch/force the VMWare kext to load. Might try that sometime

@tbodt Any update on this? It seems that the wiki may need some update / instructions how to get that working and then this issue can be closed.

[tbodt]

I ended up upgrading to an m1 and installing macos 10.15 on my old laptop which i now use whenever i want to run rr.