Apple
One of the few things an Intel Mac can do, but an Apple Silicon Mac can’t do, is run operating systems written for Intel processors in virtual machines. Most of all, this means that there is currently no legal way to start Windows on Apple Silicon Mac.
However, Apple Silicon Macs can run operating systems written for Arm processors in virtual machines, including other versions of macOS and Arm-compatible versions of Linux. And these Linux VMs get a new feature in macOS Ventura: the ability to run applications written for x86 processors using Rosetta, the same binary translation technology that allows Apple Silicon Mac to run applications written for Intel Macs.
Apple’s documentation will guide you through the requirements for using Rosetta as part of the Linux guest operating system – it requires the creation of a shared directory that both macOS and Linux can access and execute some Linux terminal commands to set up. But once you take these steps, you’ll be able to enjoy the wider application compatibility that comes with the ability to run x86 code as well as Arm code.
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Some developers, including Hector Martin of the Asahi Linux project and Twitter user @never_released, have already found that these steps can also enable Rosetta on non-Apple ARM processors, as long as they are modern enough to support at least version 8.2 of the Arm suite from instructions. As Martin points out, this is not strictly legal due to macOS licensing restrictions, and there are some relatively minor Apple-specific hardware features needed to unlock Rosetta’s full capabilities.
Ventura still does not allow the installation of x86 operating systems on Apple Silicon Mac – only running x86 applications within Arm operating systems. It also doesn’t change the state of Windows’s Apple Silicon Macs, which is caught between Apple’s restrictions on x86 guest operating systems and Microsoft’s refusal (or alleged inability) to sell licenses for Arm’s versions of Windows. If versions of Windows on Arm can ever run on a Mac, they may not need Rosetta, as Microsoft has its own x86-to-Arm translation software and is more flexible than Rosetta in some ways.
Extending the functionality of Rosetta in this way and offering it to guest operating systems, we hope, means that it will stay longer than the original Rosetta. When Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel processors, Rosetta was eventually discontinued because users didn’t actually need to run much PowerPC code other than their Mac applications. Applications written for Intel processors, on the other hand, will remain for the foreseeable future.
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