elfuse: Run Arm64/x86-64 Linux ELF binaries on macOS Apple Silicon
16 points by jeanthomas
16 points by jeanthomas
Say goodbye to x86 compatibility with the next version of OSX!
I mean in terms of support the last Intel Macs were released in 2020, and were getting major OS updates until last years release (and all the updates - including the feature updates), and will be getting security updates until 2029 (regurgitating this).
Similarly per this page it sounds like rosetta is being cut to some minimal thing, though at the same time in this year's WWDC sounded like it was being killed?
Either way: there has been plenty of time for Mac apps to transition, and things like wine seem to have their own arm64 backends now - e.g rosetta 2 in principle shouldn't be needed as it's primarily used for Mac apps, whereas when running games under wine in principle does not require an entire x86_64 copy of the OS libraries.
The more interesting question I think is whether that means dropping the hardware support for x86 features like TSO, 4k pages, etc.
All that aside, it will be annoying if I do lose the ability to run win/x86 games directly under wine, but I've had a reasonable amount of success running windows games that don't work well under wine using an arm64 windows install in parallels.
Fascinating. this sounds like WINE on Linux, or WSL1 on Windows.
I don’t think that’s right:
each guest runs inside a lightweight Hypervisor.framework VM
I'm trying to reconcile that with the next sentence
Linux syscalls are translated to macOS behavior in host-side handlers rather than served by a real Linux kernel.
So they're not running Linux in a VM, they're running ... something? in a VM, but I think it's just the translation layer.
[edit: although I just realized again that this is running under a hypervisor so this is also incorrect - it seems like some kind of combination of the two?]
It actually sounds more like wine: Wine Is Not an Emulator (I realized what I was writing and then remembered it's a [back?]acronym) as it is implementing the required windows system APIs itself on top of the host OS.