How to repackage a macOS .pkg installer for M1 support without Rosetta

To start with, some basis that you might already know:

• Apple M1 is an ARM-based CPU/GPU chip that ships with the latest Apple devices.
• Rosetta is a compatibility layer to translate x86-64 instructions to ARM instructions.

Until recently, x86-64 was happily ruling the market (and still is by orders of magnitude, let’s be honest), but since Apple dropped those LIT 🔥 M1 chips that are basically killing the game in terms of performance, things are changing.

This means that Mac software that was previously only targeting x86-64 now needs to ship universal binaries that support both x86-64 and ARM if they want native performance.

But some vendors didn’t catch up yet, and in those cases, you’ll need to rely on Rosetta for the while being to run those programs.

That being said, there’s a thin chance that the program you install can be repackaged in a way that can run natively, without Rosetta! In this post we’ll explore the Vanta agent, that claims it requires Rosetta, but can easily be patched to run natively.

If you’re in luck, you might be able to apply this knowledge to other macOS installers.

The case of the Vanta agent

As part of a security policy, my employer requires me to install an agent program on my work laptop. This program is provided by a company called Vanta.

I won’t go in details about what is this program, but if you care, you can check out my detailed post on the topic!

Anyways, they ship a vanta.pkg installer, that, when opened, claims to be incompatible with the M1 architecture and requests to install Rosetta. Not good.

Why not install Rosetta?

I don’t like installing garbage on my computer, and when I’m required to install garbage on my computer, I don’t like when on top of that the garbage requires me to emulate another CPU architecture in order to run it.

Also the challenge is fun, and a bit of software golfing here and there is always enjoyable. I know it’s common practice to golf on production code these days in the industry, but I personally prefer to keep it contained and isolated. Golfing is a personal pleasure and, like masturbating, you shouldn’t impose it on your colleagues.

How is a macOS installer (.pkg) made?

Let’s ask file(1) for some information.

$ file vanta.pkg
vanta.pkg: xar archive compressed TOC: 4838, SHA-1 checksum

It looks like we’re looking at a wild archive format, mostly used on Darwin: xar(1). Its arguments are pretty similar to tar(1).

Let’s make a directory to extract the archive in:

$ mkdir vanta
$ cd vanta
$ xar -xf ../vanta.pkg

$ ls -lh
total 8
-rw-r--r--  1 val  staff   1.1K 13 Apr 16:50 Distribution
drwx------  3 val  staff    96B 31 Dec  1969 Resources
drwx------  6 val  staff   192B 31 Dec  1969 vanta-raw.pkg

So we have a file, Distribution and two directories, Resources and vanta-raw.pkg. Let’s investigate.

$ file Distribution
Distribution: XML 1.0 document text, ASCII text

$ vim Distribution

Distribution is a XML document, and when we look at it, we can see a bunch of metadata for the macOS installer, where vendors can customize background, logos, images and so on of the installer. In our case, it also references the vanta-raw.pkg directory.

We’ll see later that’s also where we can specify whether or not the package supports universal binaries!

But first, let’s inspect that vanta-raw.pkg.

$ cd vanta-raw.pkg

$ ls -lh
total 75880
-rw-r--r--  1 val  staff    42K  4 Jan 16:32 Bom
-rw-r--r--  1 val  staff   920B 13 Apr 16:50 PackageInfo
-rw-r--r--  1 val  staff    36M  4 Jan 16:32 Payload
-rw-r--r--  1 val  staff   1.2K  4 Jan 16:32 Scripts

$ file *
Bom:         Mac OS X bill of materials (BOM) file
PackageInfo: XML 1.0 document text, ASCII text
Payload:     gzip compressed data, from Unix, original size modulo 2^32 104344576
Scripts:     gzip compressed data, from Unix, original size modulo 2^32 3072

So, another XML, two gzipped files, and a BOM file that we won’t care about in the scope of this article.

The XML specifies “bundles” as well as preinstall and postinstall scripts. Nothing really interesting in there.

Let’s look at the gzipped data. This doesn’t tell us anything other than the fact that it’s compressed with gzip… but let’s ask file for its opinion on the decompressed data.

$ gunzip < Payload | file -
/dev/stdin: ASCII cpio archive (pre-SVR4 or odc)

$ gunzip < Scripts | file -
/dev/stdin: ASCII cpio archive (pre-SVR4 or odc)

Another archive format? And another obscure (at least to me) one on top of that? Alright.

According to cpio(1), we’ll use cpio -i to extract it (it knows to handle gzipped data so we don’t need to uncompress it first).

$ mkdir PayloadOut
$ cd PayloadOut
$ cpio -i < ../Payload
203798 blocks

$ ls -lh
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  3 val  staff    96B 13 Apr 18:40 Library
drwxr-xr-x  3 val  staff    96B 13 Apr 18:40 etc
drwxr-xr-x  3 val  staff    96B 13 Apr 18:40 usr

Looks like this is the tree of files to be copied to the target system during the installation. We can do the same thing with Scripts:

$ mkdir ScriptsOut
$ cd ScriptsOut
$ cpio -i < ../Scripts
6 blocks

$ ls -lh
total 16
-rwxr-xr-x  1 val  staff   1.7K 13 Apr 18:40 postinstall
-rwxr-xr-x  1 val  staff   890B 13 Apr 18:40 preinstall

Those are two shell scripts that the installer runs respectively before and after the installation.

We don’t need to mess with those in the scope of this article, but in general, I like to read those scripts prior to running any macOS .pkg installer to get an idea of what it’s going to do to my system.

Finding the non-ARM binaries

Let’s go back to the extracted Payload and find all the executables in there to see which ones are not ARM-compatible.

$ find . type f -perm +111 | xargs file
./usr/local/vanta/launcher:          Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
- Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64]
./usr/local/vanta/launcher (for architecture x86_64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
./usr/local/vanta/launcher (for architecture arm64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64
./usr/local/vanta/osquery-vanta.ext: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
- Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64]
./usr/local/vanta/osquery-vanta.ext (for architecture x86_64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
./usr/local/vanta/osquery-vanta.ext (for architecture arm64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64
./usr/local/vanta/autoupdater:       Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
- Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64]
./usr/local/vanta/autoupdater (for architecture x86_64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
./usr/local/vanta/autoupdater (for architecture arm64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64
./usr/local/vanta/vanta-cli:         Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
- Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64]
./usr/local/vanta/vanta-cli (for architecture x86_64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
./usr/local/vanta/vanta-cli (for architecture arm64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64
./usr/local/vanta/metalauncher:      Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
- Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64]
./usr/local/vanta/metalauncher (for architecture x86_64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
./usr/local/vanta/metalauncher (for architecture arm64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64
./usr/local/vanta/osqueryd:          Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

By scanning this output we see that usr/local/vanta/osqueryd isn’t compatible with ARM. We can sort through this output to confirm we didn’t miss anything (by printing only the files where file(1) didn’t give the string universal):

$ for file in $(find . -type f -perm +111 | grep -v '\.app'); do file "$file" | grep -q universal || echo "$file"; done
./usr/local/vanta/osqueryd

So we identified our culprit.

If this binary wasn’t essential to the program (or what we specifically want to do with it), we could just ignore it and jump to the last step to prevent the installer from prompting to install Rosetta.

Replacing the binary

Because in our case it’s actually an essential binary, we need to replace it with an ARM-compatible version. This is not always going to be possible, in which case you might have to resort to Rosetta (or deciding to not install this package after all).

For this specific program, we’re in luck because osquery is actually an open source program!

This means that even if they don’t provide an ARM version, hopefully with little work we can compile from source for ARM and use that for our package.

But for us it’s even better, because they released version 5.2.2 a few months ago with Apple silicon support. Dope!

So we can just fetch the osqueryd binary from this release and replace the one from the original Vanta package.

In my case I did a few other tweaks because I didn’t want to give this program root privileges and I also wanted to monitor its HTTPS traffic, but that’s off-topic for this article.

Preventing the Rosetta prompt

Or in other words, marking the package as ARM-compatible.

If we were to repackage the installer right now, even though all the binaries in the payload are ARM-compatible, we would still be greeted by a prompt to install Rosetta when running it!

We can find the solution as part of this answer (the “Apple silicon” part). By adding the following line in the Distribution XML file inside our package, we claim that the installer supports ARM64 natively and hence doesn’t need Rosetta:

<options hostArchitectures="arm64,x86_64" />

It can be added anywhere inside the installer-gui-script node.

Repackaging the installer

Now we made sure all the binaries we needed are compatible with ARM, and the Distribution file reflects that, we’re ready to repackage the installer!

This is done in two steps.

1. Recreate the Payload cpio archive from our updated content.
2. Recreate the .pkg archive containing the whole structure.

All the necessary instructions are in this thread but I’ll detail the specific ones I used below.

The payload

For the Payload, that we extracted and updated in a temporary PayloadOut directory next to it, we’ll run the following command from the PayloadOut directory:

$ find . | cpio -oz --owner 0:80 > ../Payload
203798 blocks

Here, cpio -o archives the file list from stdin and outputs the archive in stdout. -z was added for built-in gzip compression (could also be achieved by piping the output to gzip -c). --owner 0:80 is used to archive the files with root:admin ownership (instead of my own user and group), which was necessary for this particular program.

The package

Before repackaging don’t forget to remove our temporary PayloadOut and ScriptsOut directories.

Then, from the root of the extracted package, we can run the following command to create a new package:

xar --compression none -cf ../vanta-new.pkg .

The --compression none part turned out to be important because if the XAR archive is compressed, we encounter the following error during the installation:

Error Domain=BOMCopierFatalError Code=1 "cpio read error: bad file format"

This error is kinda misleading because it points to the cpio archive while the issue really is with the top-level XAR archive.

It’s even more confusing because the macOS installer was able to extract the XAR archive to read the metadata from it (and can happily show files of the nested Payload archive), yet somehow fails to proceed with the rest of the installation because the archive it’s already reading from is compressed?

I’m not gonna try to understand why that is, but just know that --compression none is necessary for this to work!

What about the package signature?

You might have noticed that we didn’t sign that newly created package.

It turns out that this is fine. Sure, we’re now lacking the lock icon on the top right corner of the installer, but for our own usage, this isn’t a big deal. It doesn’t prevent the installation from completing whatsoever.

So how come we get a security warning when we try to run an unsigned installer downloaded from the internet? That’s because Apple flags downloaded files as quarantined. You can see it by running e.g. xattr vanta.pkg and seeing it includes com.apple.quarantine.

When opening a quarantined installer, macOS will check for a valid signature and print a security warning otherwise.

But the archive we just created on our own is not quarantined, because we didn’t download it, so macOS is happy to let us run it without signature, which is pretty useful here.

Conclusion

Was it worth going through all that trouble to keep running my software as natively as possible? Definitely not.

Did I learn a lot about macOS installers in the process, and how they handle universal binaries? Hell yeah.

So in the end, I’m happy I dug through this, and if you ended up on this article somehow, I hope this was useful to you too!

Wishing you a happy Rosetta-free Mac!

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