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by hmottestad 905 days ago
What software are you worried about? Hackernews is a great place to share and hear if anyone has similar experiences or maybe managed to find a fix!
5 comments

I work on a team that does BYO devices. Some have arm/mac, but most are on amd64/other. This forced us to make our development environment cross arch, even though our production environment is amd64/Linux only.

Some challenges included Docker images being arch specific, old Terraform modules lacking ARM support (forcing an upgrade we'd otherwise defer), and reduction in tooling we'd consider for production. We generally worry about arch specific bugs, although I don't believe we've seen any (other than complete failure to run certain tools).

Mostly x86 virtual machines for Linux and Windows. ARM ports of both platforms exist but don’t always meet use cases (binary apps, etc).
You can run x86 binaries on ARM Linux VMs running on Apple Silicon machines.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

That doesn’t work well in all scenarios.
Kind of a edge case, but we were attempting to migrate from Docker to Podman, and found running x86 container images in Podman Desktop on M-series Macs to be unacceptably slow. Docker Desktop supports Rosetta 2 virtualization which performs fine, but Podman Desktop does not.
Podman Desktop is free and open source right? You could implement Rosetta 2 support, or maybe pay them to implement it for you?

I shy away from x86 images too, even thought I use docker.

PSA: Dont get a mac with apple silicon if you need/want Virtual Box https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
VirtualBox is hot garbage. There are other virtualization tools that work perfectly fine on Apple Silicon. Like UTM. Or Parallels.