How to disable SIP when Big Sur is installed in a VMware Fusion Player virtual machine

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I have Big Sur installed in a VMware Fusion Player virtual machine. I desire to disable SIP. With an actual physical Mac, the usual method would involve first booting to internal macOS Recovery, then entering the command given below in a Terminal window.

csrutil disable

However, booting to internal macOS Recovery does not seem possible. The holding down the ⌘+R key combination at startup does not work. The Mac Startup Manager does not appear to exist. I can restart to firmware, but the Recovery volume does not have a boot.efi which can be chosen to boot from.

I realize the SIP setting is stored in the 4 byte NVRAM variable given below.

7C436110-AB2A-4BBB-A880-FE41995C9F82:csr-active-config

The firmware does allow booting to a built‑in EFI 1.0 shell. However, this shell does not appear to have any commands which can modify this variable. In fact, the variable does not even currently exist in the virtual machine NVRAM. I tried entering the command below in a macOS Terminal window.

 sudo nvram csr-active-config=%7f%00%00%00

The result was the error message given below.

nvram: Error setting variable - 'csr-active-config': (iokit/common) not permitted

What procedures can be used used to disable SIP?

I am using the current free version of VMware Fusion Player (Version 12.1.0).

Host Stats Guest Stats
iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013) Mac
macOS Catalina version 10.15.7 macOS Big Sur version 11.2
Memory: 16 GB Memory: 4 GB
Quad-Core Intel Core i5 2 processor cores
2.9 GHz 2.76 GHz
USB 3 (5 Gb/s) Samsung T7 SSD SATA HDD

Below are a links to sites with procedures that either I could not get to work or only work with previous versions of macOS.

Can I initiate a MacOS restart to Recovery mode solely from the command line?
how to disable SIP (system integrity protection) in vmware fusion 12 for macOS big sur?

Best Answer

Follow the steps below to disable System Integrity Protection (SIP).

  1. Start by booting to macOS Big Sur and opening a Terminal application window. Next, enter the command given below. This will create a NVRAM variable with the desired value, but misspelled variable name. This misspelling will be corrected in a later step.

    sudo nvram Asr-active-config=%7f%00%00%00

  2. Shutdown macOS. In the Setting window for the virtual machine, select Startup Disk. Hold down the option key and select the Restart to Firmware… button, as shown below.

    Select the EFI Internal Shell, as shown below.

    If desired, enter the command below to get full use of the window.

    mode 128 40

  3. Set the current filesystem to the EFI volume. This should be the mapped fs0 filesystem, so you would enter the following

    fs0:

    Next, verify the label is EFI by entering the command below.

    vol

    If wrong, then try fs1:, fs2:, fs3:, ....

  4. Enter the command below to save the Asr-active-config variable to the file csr.bin.

    dmpstore Asr-active-config -s csr.bin

    Note: For more information on this command enter help -b dmpstore.

    Next, enter the command below to edit the csr.bin file. You will need to correct the spelling by replacing the letter A with the letter c. The can be done by typing a 63 over the 41 on the first line.

    hexedit csr.bin

    The corrected file will appear as shown below. When finished save the changes and exit.

    Note: The value of the variable is stored in the last 4 bytes of this file.

    Enter the command below to create the csr-active-config variable in NVRAM.

    dmpstore -l csr.bin

    SIP will now be disabled on the next boot of Big Sur. If desired, enter the command below to remove the Asr-active-config variable from NVRAM.

    dmpstore -d Asr-active-config

  5. Enter the command below to leave the command shell.

    exit

    From the Boot Manager, select Mac OS X to boot Big Sur.

Format of the csv.bin File

Offset in Hex Size in Decimal Description
00-03 4 Length of variable name
04-27 36 Variable name stored as null terminated UTF-16LE string
28-37 16 GUID of the variable
38-3B 4 Attributes stored as 4 byte integer (See below)
3C-3F 4 Length of the data
40-43 4 The 4 byte integer that comprises the data
Attribute Value Description
NV 1 Non-volatile
BS 2 Boot service Access
RT 4 Runtime Access
HR 8 Hardware Error Record
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