Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that that line only refers to VM applications written and compiled for x86, and doesn't stop a VirtualBox (or any other VM provider) from compiling an ARM binary that doesn't require Rosetta.

I don't think this is a policy restriction so much as there not being support for Intel virtualisation technologies that that might rely on.

View on HN

Think this is accurate. Any modern x86 virtualization software depends on hypervisor assistance from Intel/AMD to run at reasonable speeds, and that's just virtualizing x86 on x86--more like a context shift between sandboxes. Full virtualization through a CPU emulator to boot isn't very likely to be practical anytime soon.

I suspect they'll treat it as a policy restriction, though, so they wouldn't have to deal with emulator compatibility going forward. Any solution that would be even minimally able to support virtualizing x86 would probably be ugly to keep running. If VMW or Parallels gets something going, my guess is they'll have to work through Apple to get an exception.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com