Ask HN: ARM Macs – Will/How Docker, Vagrant, Virtual Box with x86 Linux Work?

Was looking into Vagrant/Docker, and VS Code remote containers last yesterday while trying to setup cleaner env for some stuff when I couldn't answer the question as to how all of this will work in the ARM MacOS world?

Even if Docker/Vagrant... are ported, what about Virtual Box and will we be limited to ARM Linux images? If yes, would that be the end of Macs as a dev machine. If we are able to run x86 images, what sort of a performance penalty, due to the difference in architecture?

In a way this may also have a bearing on my next Macbook Pro upgrade, and to ARM or not to ARM.

Are my concerns real or unjustified?

For what it's worth, when the original Rosetta (PowerPC to Intel) was released, it wasn't faster to run emulated/translated PowerPC apps on the first generation Intel Mac, but a few Intel Mac generations later, it was. There was a reason why Apple decided to migrate off of PowerPC. :-)

See also this post about Rosetta performance from someone who ported Google Earth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23686924

For Linux and Docker, you might want to check out:

Transparently running binaries from any architecture in Linux with QEMU and binfmt_misc

https://ownyourbits.com/2018/06/13/transparently-running-bin...

Docker Engine on Intel Linux runs Arm Containers

https://blog.hypriot.com/post/docker-intel-runs-arm-containe...

While it describes running ARM linux binaries on an Intel machine, it should be possible to do the opposite.