Friday, January 2, 2026

NUC6i3 Skylake Hackintosh with Intel GPU Passthrough on Proxmox



I recently purchased a NUC6i3 and was wondering if it was possible to install Mac OS on it. After a bit of fiddling I can say that Mac OS Catalina runs on it just fine with one caveat: there are no drivers for the built in wifi card (Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260). That means you have to use the ethernet port or buy a USB wifi adapter.


One of my others goals though was to be able to remotely manage a box like this and have Mac OS run in a virtual machine. This makes maintenance much easier as you have snapshotting and backup capability.

For this build I wanted the following:


  • Proxmox Virtual Environment 6.2-6 (as of this writing the latest version in the pvetest repository)
  • Mac OS X Catalina
  • OpenCore bootloader
  • Intel HD Integrated Graphics Passthrough

The issue with the Intel passthrough is that all the guides seem to state you have to use a legacy bios. I wanted to get it to work with the latest OpenCore using an EFI partition.


A huge shoutout to Nick and his guide to get things started:
https://www.nicksherlock.com/2020/04/installing-macos-catalina-on-proxmox-with-opencore/


Do a base install of Proxmox. I use the USB method.

After installing edit /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="intel_iommu=on nomodeset nofb rd.driver.pre=vfio-pci video=efifb:off,vesafb:off simplefb=off modprobe.blacklist=i915 pcie_acs_override=downstream iommu=pt vfio-pci.ids=8086:1916"

Some of these probably aren't required but they worked for me. The intel_iommu is used to allow PCI passthrough.

After modification I ran update-grub

Next I edited /etc/modprobe.d/vfio.conf and added:

options vfio-pci ids=8086:1916

This loads the vfio-pci module and indicates that you want to passthrough the Intel integrated GPU.

A lspci command should show:
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 520 (rev 07)


The ids corresponds to this device on the NUC6.


I also blacklisted the following:

blacklist snd_hda_intel
blacklist snd_hda_codec_hdmi
blacklist i915

I added these to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf 


Afterwards I ran update-initramfs -u to make sure the changes took and rebooted. After rebooting you should have no display. This is because vfio-pci should now claim the device. After booting lspci -v shows:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 520 (rev 07) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Skylake GT2 [HD Graphics 520]
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 134
        Memory at de000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
        Memory at c0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
        I/O ports at f000 [size=64]
        [virtual] Expansion ROM at 000c0000 [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [40] Vendor Specific Information: Len=0c <?>
        Capabilities: [70] Express Root Complex Integrated Endpoint, MSI 00
        Capabilities: [ac] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit-
        Capabilities: [d0] Power Management version 2
        Capabilities: [100] Process Address Space ID (PASID)
        Capabilities: [200] Address Translation Service (ATS)
        Capabilities: [300] Page Request Interface (PRI)
        Kernel driver in use: vfio-pci
        Kernel modules: i915


One thing I had to do was make sure I installed Mac OS X first without doing the passthrough. I then added the passthrough and things worked.

I was also able to keep the monitor defined in Proxmox and was able to see some bootloader images.







No comments: