Mac OS X build instructions

Prerequisites on Mac OS X

• Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger), 10.5.x (Leopard) or 10.6.x (Snow Leopard) running on Intel hardware (PowerPC hardware is not supported). Please note that Tiger support was dropped with the 3.1 release.

• Xcode matching your Mac OS X version (​http://developer.apple.com/tools/download/):
  • 2.4.1 or later for Tiger
  • 3.1.0 or later for Leopard
  • 3.2.0 or later for Snow Leopard

• Some things from MacPorts (​http://www.macports.org/).
  After installing MacPorts, do not forget to add the following two lines to your ~/.profile

  export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
  export MANPATH=/opt/local/share/man:$MANPATH
  

Then perform the following command:

sudo port install libidl doxygen

Doxygen is optional. On 10.5 you may need a newer OpenSSL version than the one provided by the system. If so, perform:

sudo port install openssl

• Qt/Mac (​http://qt.nokia.com/downloads/mac-os-cpp)
  Carbon 4.4.x upwards for Tiger
  Cocoa 4.5.x upwards for Leopard/Snow Leopard
  

• LaTeX ("sudo port install texlive texlive-fonts-extra texlive-latex-extra texlive-latex-recommended") for building the documentation

Building VirtualBox

1. Change to the root directory of the sources and execute the configure script:

   ./configure --disable-hardening
   

   You can manually set the target architecture with --target-arch=x86 or amd64, if some architecture related problems occur.

If it finds everything it needs, it will create a file called 'AutoConfig.kmk' containing paths to the various tools on your system. Also, it will create an environment setup script called env.sh. This step only has to be done once (if something changes in your build tool setup, you might have to repeat it but keep in mind that both output files will be overwritten). For additional options like providing a path to the OpenSSL library see './configure --help'.

2. Whenever you want to build VirtualBox, you have to open a shell and source the generated environment setup script 'env.sh', i.e. do

   . ./env.sh
   

3. To build type

   kmk
   

   The default is to a release build, should you wish to do a debug or profile build add BUILD_TYPE=debug or BUILD_TYPE=profile as argument to kmk or export it as an environment variable in your shell.

Tips for building VirtualBox on Snow Leopard 32bit

For backward compatibility (that is Leopard) VirtualBox is build against the 10.5 SDK even on Snow Leopard (32bit). This can be problematic if you are using e.g. OpenSSL from MacPorts which is build against the 10.6 SDK. You have two possibilities to solve this problem:

1. Build all dependencies yourself and point them to the 10.5 SDK. Use e.g. ./configure --with-openssl-dir=/path/to/self/build/OpenSSL' before building VirtualBox.

2. If you don't care about backwards compatibility, you can force VirtualBox to be build against the 10.6 SDK. For this include the following into a file called LocalConfig.kmk, which should be located in the top level directory of the VirtualBox build tree:

   VBOX_DEF_MACOSX_VERSION_MIN = 10.6
   VBOX_DARWIN_NO_COMPACT_LINKEDIT =
   VBOX_MACOS_10_5_WORKAROUND =
   

Running VirtualBox

1. Load all the kernel extension modules. These can be found in out/darwin.x86/release/dist along with a small script (loadall.sh) to load them. Execute and make sure the modules loads successfully.
2. Enter out/darwin.x86/release/dist/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/.
3. Run ./VirtualBox