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IT Home reported on October 12 that developer Skylar Taylor-Barrick has open-sourced a project called gbos-vm, which can run Google's Googlebook OS in a virtual machine on Apple Macs equipped with Apple Silicon chips.
The project is publicly available on GitHub. It uses QEMU to load the official recovery image Google provides for the Dell Googlebook and modifies the system to work with virtual hardware. The developer stresses that the project is neither a generic Android image nor a native installation of Googlebook OS on a Mac, and that it has no official affiliation with Google or Dell.
Googlebook is a new category of laptop platform introduced by Google. According to Google's official description, Googlebook OS is based on the Android technology stack, incorporates the ChromeOS desktop experience, supports Android apps, and offers features for working across devices with Android phones.
The core work of the gbos-vm project is converting 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 graphics translation and sharing mechanisms for the virtual machine, allowing the virtual system to 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.
For installation, the project requires a Mac equipped with an Apple Silicon chip; Intel-based Macs are not supported. The developer recommends at least 16GB of memory and about 60GB of available storage, as well as dependencies including the Xcode command-line tools, Homebrew, the Java Development Kit, and the Android SDK. When the installation script is run for the first time, it downloads a recovery image of about 9GB from Google's servers, then performs the modifications, compilation, and virtual machine environment setup locally.
The project still has several functional limitations. The virtual machine's display refresh rate is limited to 60 frames per second, and some content that uses particular WebGL rendering methods may display incorrectly. Audio performance is not yet stable, while reverse clipboard copying, right-click operations, and extended use have not been thoroughly tested. In addition, the project's Bluetooth functionality cannot pair with physical Bluetooth devices.
In terms of 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 implemented some key-management functions in software and modified the vendor partition, so that partition does not receive full verified boot protection.
The developer recommends using gbos-vm for system development, testing, and exploring its features rather than as a primary everyday system, and advises against signing in to sensitive accounts within it. The project currently demonstrates that Googlebook OS can boot in a virtual machine on an Apple Silicon Mac, use the GPU, and run Chrome. IT Home notes that this does not mean the system has official Mac compatibility support, and its hardware features and security protections are not equivalent to those of a physical Googlebook.