Hello Podman users,

I wanted to make you aware of a problem our team has been having on Apple MacOS in the recent months. And no, this is not an Apple bashing opportunity; I simply want to be transparent and communicate this specific problem and how it impacts our users.

Our Podman machine OS images for Macs are highly customized and derived from a Fedora CoreOS base image. The 6.13 kernel, which came into Fedora earlier this spring, has some new kernel structures added to it. When attempting to use Apple Rosetta with a 6.13 kernel, Rosetta is doing the equivalent of a segfault. This means if we released a machine image with anything above Linux 6.12, amd64 machine translation with Rosetta would not work for our users. Other Linux distributions are also impacted by this problem. We have reported the issue to Apple.

To mitigate this problem, we have pinned our machine image to an older FCOS image based on Fedora 41 that still contained the 6.12 kernel. Our hope was this would be remedied, and we could update our images at that time; however, to date, this has not come to fruition.

Therefore, in our current development branch of Podman (5.6-dev) and its associated images, we have temporarily disabled Apple Rosetta. You can still do machine translation as before using QEMU, but you may notice performance impacts. If Rosetta becomes capable with kernels greater than 6.13, we will re-enable it in Podman and our images. This does not impact:

• Podman 5.5.0 or 5.5.1
• Previous version of Podman
• Any released Podman Desktop version

Our preference and plan is to not impact any Podman 5.5 versions. If such a change were deemed necessary, it would be widely communicated.

Brent Baude, Podman Architect, Red Hat