Cross-Compiling Rust for Rosetta on Mac

27 November 2024

On an Apple Silicon Mac I was a cross-compiling some Rust code for the x86 version of a Mac and wanted to run some tests. That is:

cargo test --target x86_64-apple-darwin

This gave me an error I didn't expect: "Bad CPU type in executable (os error 86)".

Aren't Apple Silicon Macs supposed to come with you-beaut emulation so that they run x86 binaries flawlessly? Well yes, but it turns out it's not installed by default.

% softwareupdate --install-rosetta
I have read and agree to the terms of the software license agreement. A list of Apple SLAs may be found here: https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/
Type A and press return to agree: A
2024-11-27 19:32:19.298 softwareupdate[69420:4381642] Package Authoring Error: 072-12297: Package reference com.apple.pkg.RosettaUpdateAuto is missing installKBytes attribute
Install of Rosetta 2 finished successfully

After running this command the cargo invocation works correctly.

Tech Tidbits Blog by Thomas Karpiniec
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