cocoon-macos

Known Issues

No GPU → hardware-accelerated video renders black

The display is -device vmware-svga (macOS’s only supported virtual adapter): a 2D software framebuffer with no Metal / GPU / VideoToolbox / IOSurface. CPU-drawn content renders fine — desktop, widgets, window chrome, and static images (e.g. a YouTube thumbnail) — but live video playback uses a GPU-composited hardware overlay (AVPlayerLayer + IOSurface + VideoToolbox) with no backing on a GPU-less VM, so the moving picture stays black even though audio plays and the scrubber advances. Safari has no software-rendering fallback.

• Workaround: Chrome with hardware acceleration off (Settings → System → uncheck “Use hardware acceleration when available”, relaunch) composites video in software into a layer the framebuffer can draw.
• No display-device fix: qxl / virtio-gpu / std have no macOS driver, so swapping -vga / -device cannot add acceleration.
• Real fix: GPU passthrough (VFIO -device vfio-pci) — see Roadmap.

VNC blanks on display sleep

macOS only repaints the emulated framebuffer while the display is awake; once it sleeps (~idle), VNC shows a blank white/black screen with just the cursor even though the guest is healthy (SSH works, WindowServer is up). A mouse move repaints it — it is not a GPU/driver problem. The golden image’s first-boot daemon runs pmset -a displaysleep 0 disablesleep 1 system-wide (covering the pre-login loginwindow) to keep the framebuffer painted; older images need a setup-stage rebuild.

GUI lands at the Setup Assistant

A fresh macOS 26 clone boots to the system Setup Assistant, which resists every offline marker-based skip tried (macOS 14+ broke the classic .AppleSetupDone skip). :26 is SSH/VNC-login-usable, but a fully unattended boot-to-desktop needs a mouse/OCR click-through of the SA wizard — see the WIP detail in VM Boot & Firmware and the Roadmap.

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