vmware mac big sur has no boot.efi in recovery selection

Make a bootable disk.

  1. create a vmdk with enough capacity, like 40G, add it to the guest vm.
  2. start up the vm, format the vmdk to HFS+(MAC OS扩展 日志式), name as MyVolume.
  3. download macos from app store, when installing dialog appears, leave it.
  4. open a terminal, type command below:
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sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Big\ Sur.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume

Reboot the guest vm from this bootable disk.

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BIOS -> EFI VMware Virtual SATA Hard Drive (2.0)

In recovery mode, we can switch off virtual memory.

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csrutil disable
#after reboot
cd /System/Volumes/VM/
sudo mkdir swapfile0 swapfile1 swapfile2 swapfile3 swapfile4 swapfile5
sysctl vm.swapusage

refer to:
chrisleat
https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Fusion-Discussions/Can-t-boot-into-recovery-partition-on-macOS-11-Big-Sur/m-p/2298420#M139994
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372
https://www.dazhuanlan.com/cossacks/topics/1189622