Using Rosetta with vfkit on Apple Silicon

Rosetta support enables running x86_64 (Intel) binaries in your ARM64 Linux VM on Apple Silicon Macs. This is useful for running legacy applications or development tools that haven't been ported to ARM yet.

Requirements

• Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/etc.) Mac
• macOS with Rosetta installed
• vfkit hypervisor

Configuration

Enable Rosetta in your MicroVM configuration:

{
  microvm = {
    hypervisor = "vfkit";

    vfkit.rosetta = {
      enable = true;
      # Optional: install Rosetta automatically if missing
      install = true;
    };
  };
}

The NixOS module automatically handles mounting the Rosetta virtiofs share and configuring binfmt to use Rosetta for x86_64 binaries. No additional guest configuration is required.

Usage

Once configured, you can run any x86_64 binary in your ARM64 VM. To verify Rosetta is working:

# Add an x86_64 package to your configuration
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
  file  # to verify binary architecture
  pkgsCross.gnu64.hello  # x86_64 version of hello
];

Then in the VM:

# Verify you're running on ARM64
uname -m
# Output: aarch64

# Check the binary architecture
file $(which hello)
# Output: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, ...

# Run the x86_64 binary via Rosetta
hello
# Output: Hello, world!

You can use pkgsCross.gnu64.<package> to cross-compile any package from nixpkgs to x86_64 and run it via Rosetta.

Options Reference

Limitations

• Only works on Apple Silicon Macs (M-series chips)
• vfkit will fail to start on Intel Macs if Rosetta is enabled
• Performance is slower than native ARM64 execution
• Not all x86_64 binaries may work perfectly