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5h ago

Open-Source VM Runs Googlebook OS on Apple Silicon

The project gives Mac users a way to try Googlebook OS on Apple Silicon at the cost of the hardware-backed security Google’s laptops use.

Apple M5 MacBook Air in Apple's official product photograph.
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Close-up of a dark laptop keyboard and palm rest with the Googlebook logo visible below the keys.

Overview

  • The gbos-vm project, published Sunday, Oct. 11, 2026, boots an unmodified Google ARM64 Dell recovery image inside a QEMU virtual machine on Apple Silicon Macs.
  • Developer Skylar Taylor-Barrick replaces vendor components with Google Cuttlefish virtual-device parts and packages the result so the guest OS can start on macOS.
  • Graphics are hardware accelerated by routing Vulkan through MoltenVK into Apple’s Metal and using POSIX shared memory plus texture-row padding to translate buffers between Android and macOS.
  • Practical requirements and limits make the build experimental: it needs about 16GB of RAM and 60GB of free storage, Xcode command-line tools, Homebrew, the Android SDK/NDK and a JDK, and it shows bugs such as Bluetooth crashes, a 60 fps display cap, a crashing TPM service, WebGL shading errors, and intermittent audio.
  • Security and usability are reduced because the vendor partition is rebuilt, verified-boot and hardware KeyMint/Gatekeeper protections are lost, and the VM cannot recreate Googlebook’s Titan root of trust, so the developer advises the project only for development and testing and not for daily use.