OPS and Nanos work great on both x86 and arm based macs. This includes the older x86 models from circa 2014, 2015 up to and including the arm64 m1 and m2s.
We've also added support for ops desktop for the m1 and m2 which is a graphical desktop interface.
We have set some (what we think) to be sane defaults.
If on x86 all operations such as 'image create', 'pkg load', 'ops run', etc default to using x86 Nanos and expect a x86 binary/package.
If on arm64 (m1 and m2) all operations default to using arm64 Nanos and expect an arm64 binary/package.
You may wish to create and/or run Nanos unikernels on a different architecture and that is 100% supported. For instance it is common now to do development on a Mac m2 which is arm64 based but deploy to an x86-64 server on AWS or GCP.
If we want to build and run an x86 instance on a m2 we would do the following (for example with go):
GOARCH=amd64 GOOS=linux go build myapp
ops run --arch=amd64 myappOr if we wish to crate an image:
ops image crate --arch=amd64
If you are using an x86 machine and you'd like to run an arm payload you'd do the following:
ops run --arch=arm64 myapp
If you wish to use the native architecture you don't need to specify the arch flag and ops will default to whatever the native arch is.
When enabling a different architecture than the one that is natively present the underlying qemu binary will also be switched along with many various flags.
It is important to note that you will get the best performance when using the native arch. So if you are on arm64 for performance reasons you'll want to use arm64 images/packages or vice-versa for x86.
We'd like to make this experience super seamless so if you have any issues don't be shy on opening an issue on the ops repo.