Translating JITted code is a pretty cool trick.
At runtime it doesn't really matter where you code is coming from, as long as you do flushes at the right spots.
About the Rosetta Translation Environment
31–40 of 249 posts
Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt they're licencing Transmeta. Transmeta never had an x86_64 processor.
True, but they did have the license IIRC. Otherwise they'd be licensing from VIA or whomever owns that license now. That license AFAIK would include up to SSE4. It's not like Apple is going to tell us. But the JIT nature makes me think it's Transmeta as the company currently holding that IP is a "Patent enforcement entity".
Or they're just giving Intel the finger, banking on having a warchest of defensive patents from acquiring nearly every promising fabless CPU startup of the past 15 years.
Edit: Also, I don't think Transmeta's license would include SSE4. They were defunct at that point.
Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment
#33Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment
#34From the page: What Can't Be Translated? Rosetta can translate most Intel-based apps, including apps that contain just-in-time (JIT) compilers. However, Rosetta doesn’t translate the following executables: * Kernel extensions * Virtual Machine apps that virtualize x86_64 computer platforms Some people are not going to be happy about this. Edit: But I personally am okay with that.
Like... it's not ideal, maybe, but kernel extensions are already a little touchy so I'm not surprised that they at least need to recompile, and VMs likewise are unfortunate but they can just rebuild and be good (i.e. I'm betting less than a month before people are running around using qemu-system-x86_64 natively built for ARM again).
Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment
#35From the page: What Can't Be Translated? Rosetta can translate most Intel-based apps, including apps that contain just-in-time (JIT) compilers. However, Rosetta doesn’t translate the following executables: * Kernel extensions * Virtual Machine apps that virtualize x86_64 computer platforms Some people are not going to be happy about this. Edit: But I personally am okay with that.
Meh, kernel extensions are on life support at this point.
Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment
#36Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment
#37Having big flashbacks to the switch from PPC to x86 here. Rosetta worked relatively smoothly during that transition so fingers crossed it will be ok here too.
Though with Docker support on the mac already being a second class citizen to running on Linux I wonder if a lot of devs will stop using macs for dev
Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment
#38The Apple transition to ARM for me is sad.
There was so much positivity around the Intel transition. It opened up the Mac platform. Now it’s going back into a closed black box.
Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. I predict a sudden increase of ARM servers as well.
Do Amazon have an ARM server product?
Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment
#40Rosetta's goal is to support legacy Mac apps. It's quite finely scoped, but I hope Apple will go above this and make it available as part of their virtualization framework. This way e.g. Parallels and Docker could use this to provide some way to tap in probably the fastest way to run x86 on ARM Macs.
This would mean Rosetta would go beyond its stated scope, and certainly go beyond what the relatively short-lived Rosetta 1 did, but would make it easier to integrate ARM Macs in what is still an x86 world.
I'm worried they're not going to do this because x86 emulation is probably too slow (people will attempt to run their AAA games in a VM). It would also mean that Apple will need to support Rosetta 2 forever. If they're not going to do this, everybody will have to rely on qemu. Qemu is great, but I hope it will perform adequately for at least basic Docker stuff...