Orchard

Orchard for iPhone 0.2: a faster emulator and a faster Metal path, plus a fix for guests that end up in Recovery.

Setup and settings: README.

Faster

On an iPhone 15 (A16), light scenes now reach 30–40 frames a second. Dragging a window runs at 10–15 frames a second (in 0.1 it dropped to around 7 once the Dock and menu bar were up).

• CPU (QEMU TCG)
  • The jump cache is bigger and better hashed, and keeps each process's blocks across context switches. Block-lookup misses fell from ~15% to ~3%.
  • Changing ASID flushes only the user half of the TLB.
  • The PMU is off, and fewer system-register writes end a translation block or flush the TLB.
• Fast pointer authentication (on by default, in Settings → Machine → Processor). The guest still sees PAC, but no signature is computed. That was 10–15% of the emulator's time. Turn it off if macOS stops booting.
• Metal path (reims-vgpu)
  • A guest render pass stays on the GPU as one Metal pass, instead of a GPU round trip, a full-frame readback and a re-upload for every draw.
  • Draw buffers come from a shared ring.
  • Shader keys hash faster.
  • Stores write back only the drawn area, with a NEON channel swap straight into guest pages.
• Tip: 960×540 at 30 Hz is the sweet spot. In the guest, Reduce transparency helps dragging windows.

Fixed

• Guest stuck in Recovery with no disk. This was macOS installing an automatic update, which cannot complete on this machine. Turn automatic updates off first thing; the README has the settings and the Terminal commands.
• Disk safety. The disk is flushed when the app goes to the background and on Shut Down, and the log records guest flushes and I/O errors.

Also since 0.1

• Sound (experimental, Settings → Machine → Sound).
• A shared folder: Files → Orchard → Shared, mounted in the guest at http://10.0.2.2:8080.
• Internet in the guest works.

You need

• iOS 16 or later, tested on an iPhone 15 with iOS 27, and a phone with 6 GB of memory or more.
• A signing tool that adds the increased memory limit capability, and JIT (such as StikDebug).
• A macOS 13 VM made in UTM on a Mac.

Unofficial, and not affiliated with Apple or ChefKiss. No Apple software is included. Licences: see LICENSE-NOTICE.md.

Boots a real arm64 macOS Ventura guest on iPhone through Apple's own chain (AVPBooter, iBoot and XNU) on QEMU's apple-vm machine, with the GPU drawn through Metal by reims-vgpu. Requires JIT, a signing tool that adds the increased memory limit, and a macOS VM you make yourself. It is slow — light scenes reach 30–40 fps at best.