Lima not supporting vz in Mac - works when compiled manually

[josvazg]

Describe the bug

The lima nix package is unable to use vz in Mac due to some build tooling being stale regarding the MacOS SDK version it "sees".

Steps To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Use nix package lima in a current Mac (Eg a M1) with SDK 15.0
2. Try to start a VM using vz.
3. See it fail: FATA[0000] vm driver 'vz' needs macOS 13 or later (Hint: try recompiling Lima if you are seeing this error on macOS 13)
4. Compile manually on the same machine (repository: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima cmd: make binaries)
5. See that binary work where the nix one failed.

Expected behavior

I would expect the nix package would work with vz just like the manual compilation does.

Additional context

Was trying to write a flake to reproduce and debug. This is what I found out:

• The lima Makefile would disable vz explicitly depending on the output of xcrun tool.
• The xcrun tool run by the nix package is within the nix package xcbuild which replaces xcrun with a script wrapper
• Such script seems to be stalled in the past at MacOS11.0.sdk

Seems the script itself is dynamic. Does it mean it basically depends on what version of MacOS X is running it?
Is there any easy known workaround to get this nix package working with vz?

Notify maintainers

@r-ryantm
@wegank

Metadata

Please run nix-shell -p nix-info --run "nix-info -m" and paste the result.

[user@system:~]$ nix-shell -p nix-info --run "nix-info -m"
$ nix-shell -p nix-info --run "nix-info -m"
 - system: `"aarch64-darwin"`
 - host os: `Darwin 23.6.0, macOS 14.6.1`
 - multi-user?: `yes`
 - sandbox: `no`
 - version: `nix-env (Nix) 2.18.1`
 - channels(root): `"nixpkgs, unstable"`
 - nixpkgs: `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixpkgs`

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[Frontear]

Might this be related to the recent darwin PR improving tooling for building?

I cannot for the life of me remember the PR, but I know its there somewhere

[josvazg]

I am a nix newbie, I can't figure out why the xcbuild package choses an old version of Mac SDK libraries. The way it is written, the wrapper mentioned would work if if was compiled with a version 13 or later of the SDK. But I cannot figure out why it is using older libraries.
There original repo that package is based from is archived in GH, which is problematic, but not sure is fatal.

[wegank]

Let's recheck after #346043 lands...

[emilazy]

After #346043, all that will need to be done is adding apple-sdk_13 (or whatever) to lima’s buildInputs.

[cmacrae]

i happened to stumble across this while looking for something completely unrelated, but i've been using Lima from nixpkgs with vz VMs just fine for the past week :)

[josvazg]

i happened to stumble across this while looking for something completely unrelated, but i've been using Lima from nixpkgs with vz VMs just fine for the past week :)

how? Just installed it again and it is on version 0.22.0, and I still get the same error:

FATA[0000] vm driver 'vz' needs macOS 13 or later (Hint: try recompiling Lima if you are seeing this error on macOS 13)

Anything special to do to get it working?

[josvazg]

Tried #354552 but it does not work. Apple SDK 11.3 is still used instead of Apple 15 as I tried to force.
Anyone know how to fix it?

[josvazg]

When #355729 appears in unstable I will test and close this issue

[josvazg]

It is working in unstable already:

[nix-shell:~]$ limactl --version
limactl version 1.0.1

[nix-shell:~]$ limactl list
NAME       STATUS     SSH            VMTYPE    ARCH       CPUS    MEMORY    DISK      DIR
test       Stopped    127.0.0.1:0    vz        aarch64    4       4GiB      100GiB    ~/.lima/test

[nix-shell:~]$ limactl start test
...
INFO[0000] Starting the instance "test" with VM driver "vz" 
...
INFO[0001] [hostagent] [VZ] - vm state change: running  
...
INFO[0015] READY. Run `limactl shell test` to open the shell. 

Thanks!