Packer on M3 Mac (arm64) defaults to using the qemu-system-x86_64 binary

Packer
1

Hello.
I use packer/qemu in one of my build scripts. I’ve recently switched from an intel macbook pro to an m3 macbook pro, and while trying to run packer, i’ve noticed that it defaults to qemu-system-x86_64 instead of the qemu-system-aarch64, which does not seem correct to me. I’ve tried the latest version (v1.11.1) as well as some older versions (v.1.7.1 and v.1.9.0).

I migrated some data over from my intel macbook to my m3 macbook, but i performed clean installs of homebrew & packer. I tried installing packer using homebrew and through manual installation (arm64) but still nothing.

Can someone help me out with this?

2

Hi @abhinand,

Have you tried using the qemu_binary option for your qemu config? The plugin defaults to using qemu-system-x86_64, so you can change that behaviour with this.

You can find information about this in our online docs.

Hope that helps!