A Developer Got Google’s Googlebook OS Running in a VM on Apple Silicon Macs

October 12 (IT Home) — The developer Skylar Taylor-Barrick has open-sourced a project called gbos-vm that runs Google’s Googlebook OS in a virtual machine on Apple Macs with Apple Silicon chips.

The project is public on GitHub. It uses QEMU to load the official recovery image Google provides for the Dell Googlebook, and modifies the system to adapt it to virtual hardware. The developer stresses that the project is not a generic Android image, is not a native installation of Googlebook OS on a Mac, and has no official connection to either Google or Dell.

Googlebook is a newly launched class of laptop platform from Google. According to Google’s official description, Googlebook OS is built on the Android technology stack, blends in the ChromeOS desktop experience, supports Android apps, and offers cross-device collaboration with Android phones.

The core work of the gbos-vm project is turning the Dell Googlebook recovery image provided by Google into a version that can boot on a virtual device. Because Android’s graphics interface uses Vulkan while Apple’s platform uses Metal, the developer also built a graphics translation and sharing mechanism for the virtual machine, so the virtual system can use the Mac’s GPU instead of relying entirely on the CPU to render the interface. According to the project description, after these adaptations the system can boot and run the Chrome browser.

On installation, the project requires a Mac with an Apple Silicon chip and does not support Intel-based Macs. The developer recommends at least 16GB of memory and about 60GB of free storage, plus dependencies such as the Xcode command line tools, Homebrew, the Java development kit and the Android SDK. The first time the install script runs, it downloads a recovery image of about 9GB from Google’s servers and then performs the modification, compilation and virtual machine setup locally.

At present the project still has a number of limitations. The virtual display refreshes at a maximum of 60 frames per second, and some content that uses particular WebGL rendering methods may display incorrectly. Audio is not yet stable, and reverse clipboard copying, right-click operations and long-running use have not been thoroughly tested. In addition, the Bluetooth function used by the project cannot pair with real Bluetooth devices.

On security, the virtual machine lacks some of the security hardware found in a physical Googlebook, including Trusted Platform Module (TPM) capabilities and hardware-backed key protection. The developer implements part of the key management in software and modifies the vendor partition, so that partition cannot receive the full protection of verified boot.

The developer recommends using gbos-vm for system development, testing and trying out features rather than as a daily driver, and advises against signing in to sensitive accounts inside it. The project currently demonstrates Googlebook OS booting in a virtual machine on an Apple Silicon Mac, using the GPU and running Chrome. IT Home notes: this does not mean the system has official Mac compatibility support, and its hardware features and security guarantees cannot be equated with a physical Googlebook.