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by js2 97 days ago
> Can this tool allow me to run both VMs in an Apple Silicon device in a performant way?

I use VMWare Fusion on an M1 Air to run ARM Windows. Windows is then able to run Windows x86-64 executables I believe through it's own Rosetta 2 like implementation. The main limitation is that you cannot use x86-64 drivers.

Similarly, ARM Linux VMs can use Rosetta 2 to run x86-64 binaries with excellent performance. For that I mostly use Rancher or podman which setup the Linux VM automatically and then use it to run Linux ARM containers. I don't recall if I've tried to run x86-64 Linux binaries inside an Linux ARM container. It might be a little trickier to get Rosetta 2 to work. It's been a long time since I tried to run a Linux x86-64 container.

1 comments

Possible catch: Rosetta 2 goes away next year in macOS 27.

I don’t know what the story for VMs is. I’d really like to know as it affects me.

Sure you can go QEMU, but there’s a real performance hit there.

Not until macOS 28., but you're right, it's frustratingly unclear whether the initial deprecation is limited to macOS apps or whether it will also stop working for VMs.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527

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

This can be avoided by not upgrading to MacOS 28 right? I'm new to Mac's and the Apple release schedule so I'm not sure how mandatory the annual updates are.
Does Apple Silicon support VMs within VMs?

What if you run MacOS 27 in a VM, and then run the x86-hosting VM inside that?

It would be pretty difficult for Apple to disable Rosetta for VMs.
How so?
It doesn’t require anything from the host
The Apple documentation for using the Virtualization framework with ARM Linux VMs to run x86_64 binaries requires Rosetta to be installed:

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

So you must be talking about something else, perhaps ARM Windows VMs which use their own technology for running x86 binaries[^1].

In any case, please elaborate instead of being so vague. Thanks.

[^1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...

It never existed.
Oh I have another year? Phew.