Run x86 Apps (including homebrew) in the Terminal on Apple Silicon

There&#x27;s also the &quot;arch&quot; command, to run commands under rosetta2<p>I just installed Homebrew on my new m1 MacBook Air with:<p>$ arch -x86_64 &#x2F;bin&#x2F;bash -c &quot;$(curl -fsSL <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raw.githubusercontent.com&#x2F;Homebrew&#x2F;install&#x2F;master&#x2F;install.sh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raw.githubusercontent.com&#x2F;Homebrew&#x2F;install&#x2F;master&#x2F;in...</a>)&quot;

I wonder if Nix on macOS could become a better homebrew-killer by supporting Apple Silicon first. We already do aarch64-linux natively and some iOS cross compilation, so that should give us a head start.

pkgsrc, &#x27;the portable package manager&#x27;, support Apple Silicon:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pkgsrc.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pkgsrc.org&#x2F;</a><p>No binary packages yet, but using it from source is pretty much a matter of downloading and extracting the &#x27;current bz2&#x27;, then:<p><pre><code> cd pkgrsc&#x2F;bootstrap .&#x2F;bootstrap --prefix=&#x2F;opt&#x2F;pkg </code></pre> The default prefix is &#x2F;usr&#x2F;pkg, but that&#x27;s protected by macOS&#x27; SPI. You might want to add &#x2F;opt&#x2F;pkg&#x2F;bin and sbin to your $PATH. Then to install a package:<p><pre><code> cd pkgsrc&#x2F;sysutils&#x2F;nnn bmake install clean </code></pre> Full documentation, including on how to create your own packages:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netbsd.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;pkgsrc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netbsd.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;pkgsrc&#x2F;</a>

That&#x27;s not needed though, I manually extracted brew to &#x2F;opt&#x2F;homebrew per <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.brew.sh&#x2F;Installation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.brew.sh&#x2F;Installation</a>, and it works just fine in the native terminal.<p>file htop returns<p>htop: Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64<p>So this version of brew is compiling native arm64 code.

Does Macports support Apple ARM? They have a Big Sur compatible version, so I&#x27;m inclined to think it can at least try compiling natively.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macports.org&#x2F;install.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macports.org&#x2F;install.php</a>

That won&#x27;t help running Docker and VirtualBox. There&#x27;s also a big chance VirtualBox will never make it to M1 ;(

Huh, so Apple is installing both the ARM and x86 version of apps, even on ARM computers. I guess that makes sense for portability, but I don&#x27;t know if other parts of the root filesystem are one architecture only, such as the path to the kernel (unless that&#x27;s a fat binary too?).

Would running X86 require licensing? If Intel doesn&#x27;t say anything then could Apple in a couple of years develop their own X86 CPU by turning Rosetta into a hardware solutions? Technically it should be possible - as Transmeta has done something similar, but cannot find if they got a license from Intel or it was not needed. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transmeta" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transmeta</a>

I was surprised to see that we got native Ruby 2.6 and Python 3.8 in the box. I thought Apple had deprecated scripting languages.

I&#x27;m trying to run some python code (from Pycharm). Since the specific version of tensorflow i need is not compatible with M1, I already get stuck at import tensorflow. How can i tell my mac to Rosetta 2? I know when I want to run something specific from the terminal, I can use &quot;arch -x86_64&quot;... but what do I do here?

are there any benchmarks of x86-64 homebrew ports running under rosetta2 vs the last generation of intel macs?<p>how about stuff like python, webservers or java apps running in x86-64 linux docker containers?<p>very curious what the effects are of the new arch on common developer use cases. (without having to recompile&#x2F;rebuild everything for apple arm)

I haven&#x27;t kept up too much about how they did this. Is this ultimately just about faking uname(2) in the homebrew scripts? I would imagine Apple would make the mach-o loader transparently run rosetta when they see an x86 binary in response to execve(2). In other words, why doesn&#x27;t it &quot;just work&quot;?

Hi OP, sorry for the aside, but how do you take good looking terminal photos like the first pic in the post?

Or just use iTerm, which is Intel-only so far.

Or manually install by just git cloning, so that everything else compiles for the m1, instead of using x86

Does anyone know if arm64 compiled javascript binaries will work on x86 systems?

Does this mean you can run almost any app you had before M1 in x86 mode?

when software like brew finally becomes available on Apple Silicon natively. How can I delete all this stuff I need to download under Rosetta? I don&#x27;t want to have duplicate stuff

a little more info on rosetta2<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rosetta_(software)#Rosetta_2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rosetta_(software)#Rosetta_2</a>

no, thanks.

why do people keep using this marketing fluff word &quot;Apple Silicon&quot;? should just call it Apple M1

crazy apple forgot to do this. they are forgetting their base, as per usual.