How to remove Rosetta 2 on macOS Sequoia – Apple Silicon M2

Alessandro Montini wrote:

Thank you all. I was misinformed about the disk space. Since it only takes a few MB, I'll just leave it. Problem solved!

On an Apple Silicon Mac, Rosetta 2 is quite small compared to most system components.

Initial install size: ~20–30 MB

After use (with cached translated binaries): typically ~50–200 MB total

In heavier use cases (lots of Intel apps), it can occasionally grow a bit more, but it rarely exceeds a few hundred MB

Rosetta 2 itself is just a translation layer.

The extra space mostly comes from cached translations of Intel apps you have run, which macOS stores to improve performance.

If disk space is tight, removing unused Intel apps (or their caches) has a bigger impact than worrying about Rosetta itself.

How much disc space do you think you'll recover? The Rosetta files on my Mac use a few MB of disc space.

The only reason I can think for doing it is if you're developing Apps and want to test them on a Rosetta-free Mac instead of using the IDE - and it doesn't sound like that's what you're doing.

You can't remove it without disabling SIP. I wouldn't if I were you.

It takes up almost no space at all. There's no reason to try and remove it.

Rosetta 2 is an emulator that may be invoked by the operating system of an Apple Silicon computer, such as yours.

It may be invoked under specific conditions, such as when a software application is written in 64-bit and uses only Intel binaries.

Alternatively, it may be invoked if the software has both Intel and Universal binaries.

If you upgrade your computer, Rosetta 2 will no longer be offered.

For more information, please refer to the following document:

About the Rosetta translation environment | Apple Developer Documentation 

Determine Whether Your App Is Running as a Translated Binary

On Apple silicon, a universal binary may run either natively or as a translated binary. The system runs the native version whenever possible, but the user might opt to run the code using Rosetta to support older plug-ins.

To programmatically determine when a process is running under Rosetta translation, call the sysctlbyname function with the sysctl.proc_translated flag, as shown in the following example. The example function returns the value 0 for a native process, 1 for a translated process, and -1 when an error occurs.

int processIsTranslated() {

   int ret = 0;

   size_t size = sizeof(ret);

   if (sysctlbyname("sysctl.proc_translated", &ret, &size, NULL, 0) == -1) 

   {

      if (errno == ENOENT)

         return 0;

      return -1;

   }

   return ret;

}