Last week we released Podman 5.6 and I wanted to provide an update on the Apple Rosetta situation I discussed in my June blog post.

Current Status

As we indicated in June, Podman 5.6 ships with Rosetta disabled by default due to the compatibility issues between Rosetta and Linux kernels 6.13 and above. This means users will be using QEMU for architecture translation which is not as performant as Rosetta in many situations. However, we are happy to confirm that Apple has fixed the problem in their Tahoe beta.

Rosetta with the Tahoe Beta

We have confirmed that Apple has addressed the underlying compatibility issues between Rosetta and newer Linux kernels in macOS Tahoe beta. For users willing to run beta software, it is now possible to manually re-enable Rosetta functionality.

If you have updated Podman to 5.6 but have not updated your Podman machine image, then things should continure
to work as before. The incompatibility only comes into effect when you pull and a run the newer machine image
because it has a newer kernel.

Enabling Rosetta on Tahoo

For those running macOS Tahoe beta with Podman 5.6, the following steps will restore Rosetta:

Prerequisites

• macOS Tahoe beta installed
• Podman 5.6 with the “applehv” provider
• Podman 5.6 machine image.

Steps

1. Start your Podman machine:

   podman machine start

2. SSH into the machine and create the Rosetta enablement file:

   podman machine ssh "sudo touch /etc/containers/enable-rosetta"

3. Restart the Podman machine:

   podman machine stop
   podman machine start

4. Verify Rosetta is enabled:

   podman machine ssh "cat /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/rosetta"

If Apple is able to fix the Rosetta problem in Sequoia (15), we will update users and determine a path forward for rosetta re-enablement.

Brent Baude, Podman Architect, Red Hat