With the announcement of macOS Tahoe during WWDC 2025, Apple has revealed that not only Intel Macs, but Rosetta 2 are on the chopping block.

does that mean that sometime in the future rancher-desktop would remove rosetta emulation?

well it wouldn't be RD removing. if rosetta goes away RD can't replicate that. now given their containers framework for using native linux images i am betting that rosetta in a reduced model will still hang around

Right I did mean if apple was to remove it, what would be the implication for RD. I also think it would hang around since their new cli

container

also mentions it, so not sure what the announcement was for lol

so rosetta is more often used for universal apps and i would bet that you will see apple moving folks away from universal binaries for normal apple apps

mostly pushing folks towards native

I think Rosetta 2 will remain for running Linux x86_64 binaries. What will go away is that Apple ships the whole OS with both aarch64 and x86_64 slices in the MachO binaries. This means you will no longer be able run run macOS binaries compiled for x86_64 that link to e.g. framework libraries because it is not possible to mix aarch64 and x86_64 code in the same process. If you run a binary with Rosetta, then all the libraries it dynamically links to must have an x86_64 slice as well.

and remember the runway w ppc was a while. rosetta is solid tech and i think apple will keep it around and maintained for a bit.

woah in half, I can totally see why they would want that. I guess the wording of some posts online made it sound like its completely gone but yeah I also didn't think it made sense

The original Rosetta was licensed by Apple (I think from IBM), so they had an incentive to stop distributing it, to stop paying royalties. Rosetta 2 is Apple's own code, so the only cost is the ongoing maintenance cost.

https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/how-to.md#build-and-run-a-multiplatform-image - its literally mentioned in their new container repo too so again wouldn't make sense to make new tools to just deprecate them in the next os

Which would still not be insignificant, but I think even for their new

containers

subsystem they would want to keep it around for longer.

cool, that makes sense to me, I was wondering why they would suddenly cut off developers from x86 containers, when it seems like thats one of their main customer targets

Rosetta 2 will require ongoing maintenance because changes in the Linux kernel have been breaking it repeatedly. And it also often requires updates for new versions of the M series CPUs

yup definitely no cost and rosetta1 went away in reality, but i don't think the sky is falling just yet.

Note that they wrote that they will keep Rosetta 2 in a limited capacity for "old games that are not being updated anymore". I don't actually understand how this would work if they want to remove the x86_64 binaries, but maybe they keep just a small subset of them? Anyways, none of those binaries are needed to run Linux VMs.

it was definitely a confusing article, hence why I thought I'd just ask here. Really appreciate the insight folks!

Right now the whole OS is universal binaries, so you only have a single installer. I was wondering why Apple doesn't remove them from at least executables, but I guess this would mess with code signing.

❯ file /bin/sh
/bin/sh: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64e:Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64e]
/bin/sh (for architecture x86_64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
/bin/sh (for architecture arm64e):	Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64e

devil is always in the details, but i am not breaking out my "year of the linux desktop" shirt just yet

I thought that was the year when WSL2 was released? 😛

WSL2 is wonderful but I'm also team mac for now 😉

yeah i am still the crazy one that thinks all the investment in ntoskrnl is undifferentiated and money would be better spent on getting the user experience on linux and the broader ecosystem cranked up. sort of what valve is doing, but way more broad.

Valve is such a great organization in my eyes in many ways 😍

Windows is kind of "doomed" by the file system design. It will never be able to have a high-performance filesystem because of the way drivers can redefine semantics at each directory level (reparse point). So the kernel is unable to do any kind of efficient caching.

its just that windows has become the defacto start of someone's computer usage. I think linux has some ways to go but longterm would love to see it take over

so some may have said x86 was too big of an installed fleet as well, but hey this thread is going for a reason. windows doesn't have to mean all that it does today... much like office and exchange are fundamentally different products than they were before.