apple
One of the few things that Intel Macs can do that Apple Silicon Macs can’t do is run operating systems written for Intel processors inside virtual machines. Above all, this has meant that there is currently no legal way to run Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac.
Apple Silicon Macs, however, can run operating systems written for Arm processors inside virtual machines, including other versions of macOS and Linux versions that support Arm. And these Linux virtual machines are getting 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 Macs to run applications written for Intel Mac.
Apple’s documentation will guide you through the requirements for using Rosetta within a Linux guest operating system; requires creating a shared directory that both MacOS and Linux can access and run some terminal commands on Linux to configure it. But once you’ve completed these steps, you’ll be able to enjoy the widest application compatibility that comes with being able to run x86 code and Arm code.
Announcements
Some developers, including Hector Martin of the Asahi Linux project and Twitter user @never_released, have already discovered that these steps can also enable Rosetta on non-Apple ARM CPUs as long as they are modern enough to support at least version 8.2 of the Arm. set of 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 required to unlock all of Rosetta’s capabilities.
Ventura does not yet allow the installation of x86 operating systems on Apple Silicon Macs, only running x86 applications on Arm operating systems. Nor does this change the state of Windows on Apple Silicon Macs, which is caught between Apple’s limitations on x86 guest operating systems and Microsoft’s refusal (or alleged impossibility) of selling licenses for Arm’s versions of Windows. If Arm versions of Windows can ever run on a Mac, they may not need Rosetta, as Microsoft has its own x86-to-Arm translation software and is somehow more flexible than Rosetta.
Extending the functionality of Rosetta in this way and offering it to guest operating systems, hopefully, will last longer than the original Rosetta. When Apple switched from PowerPC CPUs to Intel CPUs, Rosetta was finally discontinued because consumers didn’t really need to run much PowerPC code apart from their Mac applications. Applications written for Intel processors, on the other hand, will remain in the foreseeable future.