I’m posting this to my blog because this is information that took me a long time to find.

If you’re using OS X inside Qemu (you can find guides on this online elsewhere), you may notice that under most setups, resolution is limited to 1024x768. This is terrible for Xcode development and was a major pain for me. When I searched for a solution earlier, I only found general information about resolution issues in Linux or Windows VMs that mentioned either patching Qemu or changing graphics drivers. Neither of these seemed very relevant, so I gave up for a while.

Turns out this is a setting you can change via OS X, just not through the GUI. Edit the file /Extra/org.chameleon.boot.plist, and either add (or adjust) the file to contain the following:

<key>Graphics Mode</key>
<string>1920x1080x32</string>

Reboot after making this change. This should get things up and running at 1080p. I’m not sure if it’s relevant, but I also have the vmware tools installed and am using -vga vmware in my qemu options.

Fix thanks to Christian Simon in the comment section of this blog post (if you use NoScript or Ghostery you’ll need to allow Disqus to run).