One step further. In order to let the installer run properly, we need to completely spoof the SMBIOS.
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That’s great, hopefully this is something we can do at install time then turn off or down at runtime to prevent damage? My understanding was smbios spoofing isn’t totally safe.
I am going down the route currently of VMWare with a rawdisk, but it wouldn’t create a Big Sur temporary installation source, so I was going to install 10.15.5 then Big Sur over it.
I will try your method if it proves successful for you and install Big Sur to a second APFS volume next to Catalina.