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+1 for UTM. I use it to run an arm Linux distro that uses Rosetta for x86 binary only programs. Works like a charm and blazingly fast!



Perhaps I am reading what you wrote wrong but are you saying it can use Rosetta within an ARM Linux VM to run x86 applications in the VM?



Well damn that is pretty cool. I’ve not used UTM or the Apple Virt Framework but gonna have to look into that now! Thank you for the link.


UTM also have their own docs on it:

https://docs.getutm.app/advanced/rosetta/

And FYI, this is also available in Docker Desktop for macOS, which allows better performance when running x86_64 containers compared to the older solution where Docker was using qemu.


Do you have any sources for that? I basically gave up on Docker for M1 since the qemu performance is terrible.

Last time I checked, Rosetta only worked for one-off binaries, wouldn’t really allow docker to run more x86 code inside.


It is used for individual binaries. The Linux kernel is arm, but the binaries running on it can be x86 running on Rosetta. This works particularly well with containers, which come with their own libc.


Search for Rosetta on this page

https://docs.docker.com/desktop/settings/mac/


I'm not sure what you're asking here?

Rosetta is a tool for running x86-64 binaries on an arm64 OS.

I think you're asking if rosetta lets you run an x86 kernel, to which the answer is no - the whole point of this framework is to support virtualization, e.g. the OS is running directly on the hardware. The moment the OS can't do that, there is no point in doing anything other than emulation.


Yes, I've used it with Terraform plugins by setting the arch to x86 and running via docker. Needed to do this as some plugins don't have arm64 versions.


downside is that there is no JIT-cache so it's much slower than Rosetta on Mac as it always does the translation on demand


On the run so apologies for not reading the docs you attached yet but I’ve been having a helluva time trying to cross-compile rust from an M1 for x86_64. Will this method help in this situation? I’ve tried running an x86_64 vm in emulation to compile rust bits it excruciatingly slow.




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