[spike] What would it take to support ipsw?

[cfergeau]

ipsw files are macos restore images/installers, they can be found online in multiple places such as https://ipsw.me/product/Mac (they are downloaded from apple controlled servers). They can be used by Apple's virtualization framework to create a macos guest https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/running-macos-in-a-virtual-machine-on-apple-silicon?language=objcr
ipsw support was explicitly left out from #148 which added macos support.

It would be interesting to explore what is missing exactly in vfkit to have better support for these files, and to make a decision of what we want to/can add to vfkit to improve that support.

[adrianriobo]

Checking how this is done on other tools we found out tart is processing the images and then distributing them as OCI images. may they already solve some non obvious issue, may it is also worthwhile to check it and even may rely on their images instead of the ipsw

https://github.com/cirruslabs/tart?tab=readme-ov-file#usage

[cfergeau]

tart images are generated with https://github.com/cirruslabs/packer-plugin-tart
I think (to be confirmed) the main limitation of ipsw is that they start an interactive macOS installer.
In general, for our main use cases, pre-installed / ready to boot macOS images are more useful.