Comment by archagon
1 year ago
It's a shame that Apple's stated intent is to throw the project away after a while. Personally, I really hope it sticks around forever, though I'm not optimistic.
1 year ago
It's a shame that Apple's stated intent is to throw the project away after a while. Personally, I really hope it sticks around forever, though I'm not optimistic.
Rosetta 2 can't go away until Apple is ready to also retire Game Porting Toolkit. At most, they might drop support for running regular x86 macOS applications while keeping it around for Linux VMs and Windows applications, but that would be pretty weird.
In principle, the Linux Rosetta binaries should remain usable well into the future. Even if Apple discontinues support for Rosetta in their VMs, there's very little (beyond a simple, easily removed runtime check) preventing them from being used standalone.
AFAIK Linux Rosetta does not work standalone but uses some channels to exchange x86 and arm binary code between Linux guest and macOS host. Actual translation happens in the macOS.
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The kernel could drop support.
> game porting toolkit
I don't understand why Apple even bothers these days, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's gaming market is a quarter of what the Linux gaming market currently is (thanks to Valve and their work on proton and by extension wine)...
Because people want to use their fancy new hardware to play games? Linux market share wouldnt be increasing so fast if Valve didn’t do the work so why shouldn’t Apple do the same?
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I suspect this was a project spearheaded by some clever geeks deep in the company and promoted upwards by management. Not a top-down initiative.
Where did Apple state that Rosetta 2 was to be deprecated?
I think they assuming from the past that this will happen. When Apple moved from powerPC to x86 there was Rosetta 1. It got deprecated as well.
I think it is different this time. A lot of developers use Rosetta 2 for Linux to run x86-64 Linux Docker containers under macOS (including me). They'll be upset if Apple discontinues Rosetta 2 for Linux. By contrast, once the PPC-to-Intel transition was under way, Rosetta was only used for running old software, and as time went by that software became increasingly outdated and use of it declined. While I think Rosetta 2 for macOS usage will likely decline over time too, I think Rosetta 2 for Linux usage is going to be much more stable and Apple will likely maintain it for a lot longer. Maybe if we eventually see a gradual migration of data centres from x86-64 to ARM, Rosetta 2 for Linux usage might begin to also decline, and then Apple may actually kill it. But, if such a migration happens, it is going to take a decade or more for us to get there.
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The first Rosetta was based on licensed technology, used at a time when Apple was still pinching pennies.
It made financial sense to stop paying the licensing fee to include it in each new version of the OS as quickly as possible.
There is no financial incentive to remove the current version of Rosetta, since it was developed in-house.
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