Woah, that's unexpected and really interesting!
Edit: I wonder what the target market is, or if this is a case study for Windows Rosetta support.
Nothing really to do with Windows. If look at the overview of virtualization docs
Create virtual machines and run macOS and Linux-based operating systems.
developer.apple.com
And then look at the subsection entries with "Beta" next to them this is mainly about flushing out the robust virtualization support for Linux. About as close as get to Windows is some standard framework support for EFI for virtualized OS that require it.
That is about it. There are no VZWindowsBootloader class.
Rosetta requires the new host/virtual directory share features added.
In graphics , Some Virtio graphics features but that is mainly for minimal Linux GUI support.
In Keyboards and Input devices . Some trackpad support. (again macOS and Linux primary consumers)
In Storage : USBMassStorage support ( again macOS and Linux probably primary consumers )
In Consoles : more console support ( more akin to command line Linux as primary consumer .
In Clipboard Sharing .... macOS and Linux VM likley primary consumers .
Apple's virtualization frameworks is still relatively thin. Folks like Parallels and VMWare still have lots they can layer on top as a value add for more robust virtualization environments.
When I think "Linux VM," I don't imagine people clamoring to run some proprietary/abandonware x68 binaries on aarch64. It's odd. OTOH, I wonder how x86 Steam runs in an aarch64 Linux VM with Rosetta...
The target market is non full open source VM linux instances that someone want to migrate over from x86-64 Linux to Linux on M-series . [ Apple probably has more than several of these in house (**) . Other folks running cloud services operations would have them too. ] Most major software packages will have linux port but if there is some commercial vendor product that are using for some sub-service that hasn't ported to Arm yet . To da. Can use the binary on a VM machine instance that is mostly ported over. Very similar baseline reason as use it on macOS. Not all software vendors can port their software over at the same speed.
Apple barely has GUI linux running running well. This isn't primarily targeted for gaming.
I suspect the Asahi Linux folks will be publishing some interesting tidbits soon.
This has little bearing at all to Asahi Linux which nominally supersedes the macOS at the bare metal layer. This is a "call out" mechanism to Rosetta running on the host macOS instance from a virtualized Linus instance inside an Apple framework foundation based virtual machine. If there is no host macOS layer , it doesn't work.
Ahashi Linux probably does not have a large stack of commerical binaries that are only compiled for x86-64. So really has no use for this. If 99% of the apps are all ARM on that Linux distribution then there is no traction here.
Rosetta is owned by Apple so Asahi can't just take it and stuff it into their Linux distribution.
An noone has an intense need for the Asahi distribution to run on VM machine instance. There are several distributions that run fine on these virtual machines.
(**) Not trying to imply that Apple is going to wholesale move the bulk of their cloud services stack onto Mac running virtual machines. But like several niche areas where things are running on Intel Macs with Linux virtual machines on top ( e.g. engineering software that is Linux only. Or perhaps something in the XCode cloud stack that is mac based. ) . Suspect folks like MacStadium and Amazon AWS have customers with more "entangled" , complex software stack ecosystems that have been cobbled together over lots of years using several commercial vendor apps in the mix.
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
