A general purpose Apple Silicon layer for x86-64 PCs. It is a UEFI boot program with an arm64-to-x86-64 translator, a Metal driver for NVIDIA GPUs and a model of Apple silicon hardware. macOS and most apps start, but it is slow and needs much more testing, as of v0.1.0
So, <i>basically</i> an emulator layer that doesn't need a host OS? (I'm not really interested in running Darwin, but that's a cool concept)
"An ahead-of-time and just-in-time compiler translates arm64e code to x86-64."<p>No, not the same, actually. It's more of a Rosetta, but other way round, if I understand this right.
Rosetta is an emulator (or, I suppose, a series of emulators), i.e. a piece of software that makes a computer pretend to be another kind of computer. This is also a bit of lower level software that makes a (x86_64) computer pretend to be a different kind of computer (aarch64), in this case, by AoT and JIT translation, though that's an implementation detail. What distinction are you trying to make?
This doesn't emulate a computer so that code in another architecture can run, it translates the other architecture'a code to native code. It's a small difference, but I guess it is a difference.
Is this not how qemu works? Is rosetta not considered an emulation layer? For all its name suggests otherwise, I would certainly refer to wine as an emulator, and it also uses these techniques.
Not to be That Guy, but WINE <i>doesn't</i> use those techniques, and thus isn't an emulator.<p>It lightly translates <i>binary formats</i> (Windows executables) into Linux-compatible executable code, and then runs that code against libraries that implement Windows APIs in terms of Linux underneath. It's not an emulator in the same way that your libc isn't <i>emulating</i> lockf(3) in terms of fcntl(2) underneath. In web-dev parlance, we'd call WINE a polyfill.<p>Rosetta and QEMU on the other hand <i>are</i> emulators--emulators, in this instance, being a term of art that implies interpreting bespoke meaning from machine code instructions written in another program. Some emulators translate instructions 1:1, some have optimized stencils, some (like Rosetta) have kernel support for emulating very quickly, and some (maybe like Rosetta; sources disagree) also have hardware support as well.
Wine as a polyfill makes so much more sense
> It lightly translates binary formats (Windows executables) into Linux-compatible executable code,<p>Does this not involve transpilation? I guess I was grouping that in under dynamic recompilation and AOT techniques.<p>Regardless, I don't think that there's a benefit from defining emulation from an implementation rather than an empirical perspective. If it runs a chunk of code as if it were in a different environment, I'm kind of ok to call it an emulator. To the sibling's point, a polyfill would also fit as an emulation layer here.
I noticed Golden Gate still ships with an x86_64 kernel (not kernelcache), I wonder if this is any useful<p>james@Jamess-MacBook-Pro ~ % sw_vers
ProductName: macOS
ProductVersion: 27.2.1
BuildVersion: 26B131
james@Jamess-MacBook-Pro ~ % file /System/Library/Kernels/kernel
/System/Library/Kernels/kernel: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
james@Jamess-MacBook-Pro ~ % strings /System/Library/Kernels/kernel | grep "Darwin"
@(#)VERSION: Darwin Kernel Version 27.2.0: Wed Oct 14 23:40:09 PDT 2026; root:xnu-13432.41.4~25/RELEASE_X86_64
Darwin Kernel Version 27.2.0: Wed Oct 14 23:40:09 PDT 2026; root:xnu-13432.41.4~25/RELEASE_X86_64
Darwin
Huge. I have been desperately looking for a project like this to be able to use <a href="https://github.com/seedds/nxnative" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/seedds/nxnative</a> to be able to play my copy of BOTW on IOS. Thank you for sharing this, I will be trying it this evening.
Sounds like a great use for those new Epyc processors with 256 cores…
This repository needs a star and a follow. It stops Intel Macs from becoming obsolete, but it is slow and buggy.
Apple still supports the latest ones up to Tahoe, and probably security updates for a few years. You can install Windows 10 (no idea about 11) but that is only updated through next year. After that, there's Linux, of course.
macOS does get <i>some</i> security updates for the non-latest version, but it does not get <i>all</i> security updates.<p><a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/psa-apple-isnt-actually-patching-all-the-security-holes-in-older-versions-of-macos/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/psa-apple-isnt-actua...</a>
I don’t think there is anything that can make Intel Macs not obsolete. Embrace it - that’s their charm and you should use them as they were intended to be used, and experience them as they were designed, as artifacts of their time.
No thank you. They can sit in a museum 30 years from now. Today, they are still amazing and productive machines (once you get macOS off them).
I installed CachyOS on my MacBook 16,1, and it feels much faster than with macOS, but the D side is still hot though.
Many (most?) Intel Macs still receive microcode updates, Mesa support and recent kernel changes.<p>The only obsolete part is macOS, which is removable.