Emulating ARM (M1-like) macOS on an x86 Intel Mac

Question

Is it possible to emulate a macOS machine with RISC/ARM architecture on a physical x86 macOS machine? I suspect this is of value for those hoping to test the viability of their workflows on Apple silicon. In such cases, a performance penalty is of no consequence.

The only discussion I can find is here, though I don't find it particularly convincing or authoritative.

Answer 1

Yes, in theory it is possible to emulate a M1 Mac on an Intel Mac. As such there's nothing "magical" about the M1.

However in practice you're going to run into various problems, mainly that there's no readily available software that does this. You can get much of the way of emulating the CPU itself using qemu. qemu already supports emulating various aarch64 CPUs, but it doesn't emulate the M1 and its Apple-specific instructions (yet), nor does it emulate the rest of the SoC or the rest of the Mac's peripheral units.

Last there's the question of legality. When you want to run macOS, you need to be properly licensed for that. You will need to investigate the license carefully to ensure that you can run the M1 macOS software on your Intel machine.