Essentially, what van Rhee already said.īut then I found this. I still don't definitively know if you can get the OS X 10.7 64-bit kernel running on your specific kind of Mac, but I suspect for the reasons mentioned in this image from the MacRumors forum thread that you can't: 'Problem is cards like Does NOT have 64-bit Kexts 64-Bit Kernel will NOT load these 32-bit kexts'. OS X Daily's article links to a series of forum posts at MacRumors - Success! Install 10.8 on old unsupported Mac. I found the following: OS X Daily - Got an Older Mac? MLPostFactor Installs OS X 10.8.3 on Old Unsupported Macs. I did some more digging searching for a real workaround of some kind, not just theory. (Aside: Why do you want to run the 64-bit kernel, anyway? The OS X 32-bit kernel can run 64-bit programs.) On the one hand, the author states that the limitations may be artificial, which still indicates some promise of a workaround, but on the other hand, as van Rhee's answer also already pointed out, you may end up with devices without support under 64-bit. Wanting to run a 64-bit kernel for testing and debugging, this may not The kernel, when running, would not be able to use firmware services. Although a 32-bit EFI could launch a 64-bit kernel, The first limitation actually does have merit and is arguably not all (A cursory look suggests thatīoth of these 'limitations' are technically artificial, albeit to

The machine’s model is prohibited from booting K64 through a hardcoded list within the boot loader.Out of theīox, boot.efi will not boot K64 even if you have a 64-bit processorĪnd explicitly request K64 if at least one of the following is true. Unfortunately, a 64-bit processor alone doesn’t suffice.

Here's the part I found most relevant to your question: See Mac OS X Internals - Is Your Machine Good Enough for Snow Leopard K64?

His post mentions Snow Leopard (10.6), but the issues would be similar for 10.7. I found a post on the subject from the guy who wrote this book about Mac OS X internals.

Docker on mac 10.6.8