This article will explore how applications compiled for the x86 architecture can be executed on macOS systems running on ARM64 hardware. The objective is to understand why we need tools for it, and to dissect different existing solutions.

Perf is a performance analysis tool for Linux. It instrumentalizes events setup by the kernel to monitor applications. While it makes sense that kernel events are available to a tool implemented inside the kernel, how can perf know about CPU metrics, such as the number of instructions a program executed?

In this article, we’ll write a simple 32bits ‘Hello, World!’ kernel for x86