Provisioning Fedora CoreOS on AppleHV

This guide shows how to provision new Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) instances on macOS using vfkit.

Prerequisites

Before provisioning an FCOS machine, you must have an Ignition configuration file containing your customizations. If you do not have one, see Producing an Ignition File.

You will also need to build or acquire vfkit. Prebuilt binaries are also available from its releases page. Vfkit, like QEMU, has many options which are outside the scope of this provisioning example. Please consider reading their documentation.

Booting a new VM on macOS

This section shows how to boot a new VM with vfkit. Vfkit is known to work with both Intel and Apple Silicon based Macs.

Fetching the AppleHV image

Fetch the latest image suitable for your target stream (or download and verify it from the web). Remember to download the appropriate image based on the architecture of your Mac. Once downloaded, you will also need to decompress the image.

Setting up a new VM

Vfkit is not a stateful virtual machine framework. You simply need to run the vfkit binary to start a virtual machine. The following command line will launch a VM with:

  • 2 virtual CPUs

  • 2 GB of memory

  • a network device that will receive a IP address from Vfit

  • a GUI console with keyboard and mouse support

Launching FCOS with Vfkit
IGNITION_CONFIG="/path/to/example.ign"
IMAGE="/path/to/image.qcow2"

./vfkit --cpus 2 --memory 2048 \
  --bootloader efi,variable-store=efi-variable-store,create \
  --device virtio-blk,path=${IMAGE} \
  --device virtio-net,nat \
  --ignition ${IGNITION_CONFIG} \
  --device virtio-input,keyboard \
  --device virtio-input,pointing \
  --device virtio-gpu,width=800,height=600 \
  --gui

Note: The AppleHV hypervisor does not allow you to see early boot and kernel messages. While you will see a GRUB boot menu, you will not see anything until later in the boot.

Exploring the OS

Vfkit GUI

When FCOS is completed booting, you will see the IP address of the VM displayed in the GUI window. Vfkit will lease an address in the 192.168.64.0/24 network. At this point, you can either choose to login or SSH to the VM. Unlike some other virtualization providers, you can SSH to the virtual machine from the host.

ssh core@192.168.64.5

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