When translation finishes, the system launches the translated executable in place of the original. If an executable contains only Intel instructions, macOS automatically launches Rosetta and begins the translation process. Once translated, the application is in effect a native arm64 binary making native macOS system calls. The entire binary is translated from x86 to Apple Silicon and launched. Rosetta 2Īpple's emulation, on the other hand, happens before the application launches.

You can run most any Intel Operating System and associated applications. There are generally few limitations to QEMU's Intel emulation. From the Linux kernel down to your /bin/ls command. With this framework, it emulates every instruction doing everything with Just in Time translation. In order to emulate a a Linux system, QEMU must also emulate storage devices, console output devices, ethernet devices, keyboards, and the entire CPU. However, they tackle the problem in vastly different ways. I use a cheap NVMe SSD in a 10Gbps USB-C enclosure-not this exact one, but one like it.Rosetta and QEMU are both emulators.

Any external SSD attached over a 5Gbps or 10Gbps USB connection or the Thunderbolt bus should feel fast enough for most things. Mac users with limited internal storage might want to change that to an external drive to save space, since the default disk size for new macOS VMs is 64GB.

And more is better, especially if you'll also be running heavy apps like Xcode alongside (or inside) your VM.īy default, VirtualBuddy keeps all of its files (including VM disk images) in a folder at ~/Library/Application Support/VirtualBuddy. Personally, I wouldn't recommend trying to virtualize macOS on an Apple Silicon Mac with less than 16GB of RAM. But you'll be running two entirely separate OSes on the same computer, and that comes with RAM and storage requirements. VirtualBuddy and the Virtualization framework don't have hard-and-fast requirements aside from requiring an Apple Silicon chip for macOS-on-macOS virtualization. You'll also want to pay attention to the hardware requirements for virtualization. With the Xcode beta installed, everything works as intended (but if you can find a way to get this working without installing a 33GB app that takes an hour-plus to install, I'd love to know about it). When I've tried this without Xcode installed, macOS has tried (and failed) to download extra software to make it work-sort of like how macOS needs to download additional software the first time you use Rosetta. If you're looking to virtualize Ventura on top of Monterey, you'll want to install and run the beta version of Xcode 14 from Apple's developer site before you start. If you want to virtualize macOS Monterey on top of macOS Monterey, you won't have to download anything else.

Qemu apple silicon