apple silicon

With macOS Ventura, Apple added support for amd64 instruction translation to Linux VMs in Rosetta 2. This means that in addition to Virtio file sharing (macOS Monterey), applications using the Virtualization framework can perform significantly better. Now, this allows you to be able to develop legacy software in an emulated Linux virtual machine (in this context, legacy refers to non-AArch64 compliant software). Now, to be clear, emulated amd64 is still very slow compared to native instructions, but, it is better than nothing....

After 12 years, it was finally time to replace my original 2008 unibody MacBook Pro. With the iPad Pro taking over the role of mobile computing device, I opted for a Mac Mini with the M1 chip. First impressions are that the hardware is really fast, the I/O is a bit sparse, and the Big Sur is buggy. One of the first things I tested was Xcode unarchiving and I was able to use xip to unpack Xcode 12....