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I hope they keep around the underpinnings for Rosetta 2 (without the macOS parts) just to keep supporting Intel virtualization for things like Docker. Heck then
by kalleboo 6mo ago
I hope they keep around the underpinnings for Rosetta 2 (without the macOS parts) just to keep supporting Intel virtualization for things like Docker. Heck then anyone who really needs to run some old Intel app can run a virtualized older version of macOS.
But I wonder if they're eager to drop support for the Intel TSO memory model from their CPUs.
- zitterbewegung 6mo agoApple will keep Rosetta 2 support for Intel virtualization. See https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/about-the-rosetta-translation-environment/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...
- andor 6mo agoThe page doesn’t actually say that explicitly
- mrpippy 6mo agoTrue, Apple's developer and support pages are not all fully up-to-date or explicit. From the macOS 26.4 release notes (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-26_4-release-notes https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...): > There will continue to be support for older, unmaintained gaming titles leveraging Rosetta along with software running Intel binaries in Linux VMs.
- kalleboo 6mo agoOh yeah, I had forgotten about the weird "games" exception. At least that means they'll keep parts of Rosetta 2 around in the code, but they could also end up doing some weird whitelisting for the specific games they want to support and not let anyone else keep using it.
- piperswe 6mo agoI suspect they're keeping the translator itself around, but not the x86_64 versions of system libraries
- mrpippy 6mo agoNo, those need to stay (at least the ones needed to run the targeted "old unmaintained games"). What can go is all the x86_64 slices of system binaries (i.e. bash, perl, etc etc)
- stetrain 6mo agoI read somewhere that the part that allows a virtual machine to use Rosetta inside the VM is sticking around. MacOS on ARM can't directly virtualize an Intel OS using Rosetta today using the native virtualization framework, you need something like qemu for that. But you can use an ARM linux VM with the Rosetta framework installed internally to run x86 containers, which is I think how docker desktop and similar alternatives are handling it.
- mrpippy 6mo agoCorrect, that is staying around. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-26_4-release-notes https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...: > There will continue to be support for older, unmaintained gaming titles leveraging Rosetta along with software running Intel binaries in Linux VMs.
- lxgr 6mo agoSame here. Would be very sad to lose Wine capabilities as well, and presumably these have minimal macOS dependencies.
- jeroenhd 6mo agoWine can run on aarch64 with FEX reasonably well already, no special instructions or hardware acceleration required. There's a bit of extra overhead, but that shouldn't be a problem for old games on modern hardware, they should run about as well.
- lxgr 6mo agoInteresting, do you know if performance is roughly comparable with Rosetta 2, i.e., are we talking about a few percent of overhead or something more dramatic? (For CPU-bound code; I understand that the overall effect will be smaller due to GPU code probably being executed host-side in native code etc.)
- jeroenhd 6mo agoFEX isn't done yet, but Valve's people seem to suggest an overhead between 10-20%. Not great for getting the most out of a CPU, but small enough to compensate say the difference between an M1 and an M5 chip.
- lxgr 6mo agoThat's really promising, I expected much worse. Thanks for highlighting!
- ralphc 6mo agoIf Intel virtualization works for Docker, why doesn't it work for things like VMWare or VirtualBox for Intel VM's?