Skip to content

macos-podman-rosetta.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
89 lines (63 loc) · 3.61 KB

macos-podman-rosetta.md

File metadata and controls

89 lines (63 loc) · 3.61 KB
Raw

Enabling Rosetta for x86_64 Container Images on macOS (Apple Silicon)

Some container images in this project (notably the CUDA and aipcc-based images) are built only for linux/amd64. On Apple Silicon Macs, podman uses QEMU by default to emulate x86_64, which can be slow or crash with large images (segfaults are common with CUDA base images under QEMU).

Apple's Rosetta translation layer is significantly faster and more stable. Podman supports Rosetta but ships with it disabled by default due to a past incompatibility between Rosetta and Linux kernels 6.13+. Apple fixed the kernel-side crash in macOS Tahoe (macOS 26), but podman-machine-os has not yet re-enabled Rosetta by default (containers/podman-machine-os#212), so the manual trigger below is still required.

Note

Rosetta support in the podman machine VM requires Podman 5.1.0 or later.

Enabling Rosetta

Create the trigger file inside the podman machine VM and activate the systemd service:

# Create the trigger file and activate Rosetta (no machine restart needed)
podman machine ssh "sudo touch /etc/containers/enable-rosetta && sudo systemctl start rosetta-activation.service"

# Verify Rosetta is active
podman machine ssh "cat /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/rosetta"
# Expected output starts with: enabled

This survives podman machine stop / start cycles (the trigger file is on /etc which persists). However, podman machine rm followed by podman machine init wipes the VM state, so you need to run the commands again after recreating a machine.

Known issue: podman machine inspect may be misleading

podman machine inspect reports a Rosetta field in the machine config, but this config flag does not reliably control whether Rosetta is actually active inside the VM (containers/podman#28181). Always verify with the binfmt check above.

Verifying it works

podman run --rm --platform=linux/amd64 registry.access.redhat.com/ubi9/ubi uname -m
# Should print: x86_64

If this prints x86_64 without segfaulting, Rosetta is working.

Troubleshooting

QEMU segfault with CUDA images

If you see qemu: uncaught target signal 11 (Segmentation fault) - core dumped when pulling or running a large amd64 image, enable Rosetta as described above.

Rosetta activation fails

If cat /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/rosetta shows nothing after the steps above, check:

podman machine ssh "systemctl status rosetta-activation.service"
podman machine ssh "ls -la /var/mnt/rosetta 2>/dev/null || echo 'rosetta mount missing'"

The Rosetta VirtioFS mount must be present at /var/mnt/rosetta. This requires macOS Tahoe (26) or later.

Installing packages inside the podman machine VM

The podman machine runs Fedora CoreOS, which has a read-only /usr filesystem. To install debugging tools:

podman machine ssh
sudo bootc usr-overlay   # creates a transient writable overlay on /usr (lost on reboot)
sudo dnf install htop    # now works

Note: /etc is always writable -- no special command needed for config files there.

References