Stela boots macOS on ordinary x86-64 PCs by translating arm64 on the fly

A general purpose Apple Silicon layer for x86-64 PCs

Stela boots macOS on ordinary x86-64 PCs by translating arm64 on the fly

Stela is a UEFI boot program that lets x86-64 machines run Apple Silicon software. It combines an ahead-of-time and just-in-time compiler that translates over 3,000 AArch64 instruction encodings to x86-64, a Metal driver for NVIDIA GTX 16 and RTX 20 series GPUs and newer, and a model of Apple silicon hardware. It emulates a Mac mini (M2) running macOS 27. As of v0.1.0, macOS and most apps start, but slowly, and the author warns that booting is still unlikely.

Stela is very much still in development. Your current chances of it booting are low, major hardware support/fixes are on the way.

More from this day

2026-11-12