media.ccc.de: MRMCD2026 - Of Wayland, MicroVMs and more: Running Linux applications on OSX.

https://media.ccc.de/v/2026-638-of-wayland-microvms-and-more-running-linux-applications-on-osx

Apple's M-Series chips are very fast and popular, but it can be pretty difficult to run any software not made for their platform on these machines. This is a deep-dive into writing and using various translation layers to integrate Linux applications seemlessly into Mac OS X.

If you happen to have access to a Mac powered by Apple Silicon, chances are you got frustrated with theses machines. On one side they are pretty fast, on the other running anything not sanctioned by Apple gets annoying just as quick. Even if you get all the security measures out of your way, you are still left with a platform, that has put up a bunch of barriers simply by doing things differently and refusing to adhere to common standards. OS X has it's own accelerated graphics api, spotty unix conformance, it's own UI toolkit and much more. Even though the ARM platform has gotten more common in recent years in desktop-grade machines, these chips also run on an unusual 16-bit page size. Which means not many previously existing binaries run without some kind of emulation or translation and Apple only provides those for older OS X software. You can deal with these by using virtual machines of course, but integration into the rest of the OS is usually severly lacking.

In this talk we explore ways to overcome each and every one of these barriers one by one to make unmodified linux applications feel right at home on Mac OS X through a combination of various translation layers and other technologies.

Drakulix

https://talks.mrmcd.net/2026/talk/N9SNKN/

#mrmcd26 #InfrastructureandSoftware

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/