[kalleboo]

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]

Apple will keep Rosetta 2 support for Intel virtualization. See https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...

[kalleboo]

Oh 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]

I suspect they're keeping the translator itself around, but not the x86_64 versions of system libraries

[mrpippy]

No, 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)

[andor]

The page doesn’t actually say that explicitly

[mrpippy]

True, 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-note...):

> There will continue to be support for older, unmaintained gaming titles leveraging Rosetta along with software running Intel binaries in Linux VMs.

[stetrain]

I 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]

Correct, that is staying around.

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.

[ralphc]

If Intel virtualization works for Docker, why doesn't it work for things like VMWare or VirtualBox for Intel VM's?

[lxgr]

Same here. Would be very sad to lose Wine capabilities as well, and presumably these have minimal macOS dependencies.

[jeroenhd]

Wine 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]

Interesting, 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]

FEX 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]

That's really promising, I expected much worse. Thanks for highlighting!