This is some very cool hacking, but I’m more interested in knowing how Apple Silicon will run x86 Windows and Linux stuff. Can virtualization software get help from Rosetta 2? Or is QEMU and similar the best we can hope for?

For Linux guests:

_If you really need to_, Huawei provides the ExaGear Server translator for Linux at https://www.huaweicloud.com/kunpeng/software/exagear.html , which allows to run x86 and x86_64 apps on an arm64 Linux system, including Docker containers for their customers. That translator works pretty well in most cases.

Note however that you need to create a Huawei account to download this.

For Windows guests:

Run arm64 Windows, the JITs to run x86(_64) apps are included with the OS.

The VHDX for virtual machine use can be downloaded from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsins...

skissane

Why use ExaGear, why not just use qemu-user-static?

Why would I want to use a (presumably) closed-source solution from Huawei whose documentation is only in Chinese, when I could instead use a well-known open source project with plentiful documentation in English?

my123

It's because Qemu is several orders of magnitude slower, it's not even in the same class of solution.

FEX is an experimental open-source solution at https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX, but it's still in heavy development.