Rosetta 2 Reverse Engineering Project
A comprehensive reverse-engineering effort to understand and document Apple's Rosetta 2 binary translation technology.
Table of Contents
Background
The Architecture Transition
In November 2020, Apple announced their first Apple Silicon Macs, marking a historic transition from Intel x86_64 processors to their own ARM-based M1 chips. This was Apple's third major architecture transition:
1994: Motorola 68000 -> PowerPC 2006: PowerPC -> Intel x86_64 2020: Intel x86_64 -> Apple Silicon (ARM64)
Each transition required a binary translation solution to run existing software during the migration period. Rosetta 2 is Apple's most sophisticated binary translation system yet.
What is Rosetta?
Rosetta (2006-2011) was Apple's first dynamic binary translation software, enabling PowerPC applications to run on Intel-based Macs.
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