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Tech Preview of Docker Desktop for M1

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Re: Tech Preview of Docker Desktop for M1

#51

Post by ploxiln »

outworlder wrote: post #37
munro wrote: post #2

Does this mean I can run containers natively on Mac? And I don't need a VirtualBox VM running on my Mac to launch containers? This would be huge for me, and is always a big in my mind why I would consider switching back to Linux. Edit: Docker on Mac has never felt as snappy as on Linux, because of the VM, though I have no hard numbers. Networking is a PITA, but it's not hard to figure out. The other main thing I hate…

> Docker on Mac has never felt as snappy as on Linux It's extremely slow compared to Linux and I'm pointing my fingers at the virtualization layer without any hard evidence because it's the most likely suspect. With all this focus on sandboxing apps of late, I'm wondering how far the OSX kernel is from having a feature set that resembles cgroups and network namespaces.

I used docker inside a vagrant+virtualbox VM running ubuntu, on macOS, for a few years. It's more reliable, and more debuggable, than docker for mac. It's some easy-auto-transparent storage and networking layers that make docker-for-mac so flaky.

Re: Tech Preview of Docker Desktop for M1

#52

Post by jcollins »

diveanon wrote: post #29
jcollins wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is overhead for sure but if you use x86 containers on an Intel Mac or arm64 containers on an Apple Silicon mac, it's pretty performant.

Can you share any details on M1 perf and resource consumption? Docker vm on mac is noticeably slower and consumes a lot of resources in my experience.

The only thing I can say with confidence is that if you're using ARM containers it is really fast, probably thanks to the Apple Silicon.

I imagine memory consumption is on par with running on Intel. I don't think Docker Desktop can really change that.

Re: Tech Preview of Docker Desktop for M1

#53

Post by diveanon »

perbu wrote: post #33
diveanon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad, if they had it running natively I would actively consider switching back to mac. Glad to see they are making progress on the M1 port though, my team will be excited.

If Docker for mac was running natively it would be more or less useless. Nobody deploys production code on MacOS hosts anymore. That it is all so smoothly powered by Linux is what makes it a great product.

I develop exclusively on Linux, but it would be nice if my teammates who don't didn't melt their laptops doing local dev on mac.

If apple gave a shit about non apple developers they would provide the kernel hooks to help make it possible.

Also, nobody deploys on mac hosts because virtualizing macos in a cloud environment is against tos, so options are expensive and limited.

Re: Tech Preview of Docker Desktop for M1

#54

Post by MangoCoffee »

ogre_codes wrote: post #49

This bit about Multi-platform development is most interesting to me. > Many developers are going to experience multi-platform development for the first time with the M1 Macs. This is one of the key areas where Docker shines. Docker has had support for multi-platform images for a long time, meaning that you can build and run both x86 and ARM images on Desktop today. If multi platform images work, a lot of the concerns…

>Of course, once you can do everything on ARM as well as you can on x86.

i have high hope for AMD/TSMC to push x86. Intel seem to be...stuck for now.

Re: Tech Preview of Docker Desktop for M1

#55

Post by mulcahey »

Perhaps a dumb question but I'm curious why people don't use a VPS or a cloud linux machine more for Docker/K8s development instead of running Docker locally on a Mac.

In my experience Docker Desktop has been such a resource hog, and Apple's hypervisor implementation pretty poor. I much prefer to have all that heavy lifting isolated away from my development machine to keep it responsive and cool.

Re: Tech Preview of Docker Desktop for M1

#56

Post by ogre_codes »

jbirer wrote: post #44

Absolute disaster, this platform. The opacity and lack of early availability for development made for a really ugly adoption experience. I feel that people should not encourage this and vote with their money in the DevOps / Dev sector to discourage other companies from pulling the same stunt.

The expectation that a ~2 month old platform is going to perfectly replicate the functionality of 30+ year old platforms is absurd.

Compared to the PPC->Intel transition, this is a cakewalk. Compared to Microsoft's (multiple attempts) to migrate to ARM, this is a true triumph.

Re: Tech Preview of Docker Desktop for M1

#57

Post by gmaster1440 »

I've tried one of the preview builds as part of their Developer Preview Program[1] and it's super fast when you're running an arm64 image, as opposed to an amd64 that will automatically be run via qemu (and therefore incur some overhead). By "super fast", I mean I was seeing speeds comparable to running the commands natively on the M1 mac (npm install and a heavy Gulp build).

[1] - https://www.docker.com/community/get-involved/developer-prev...

Re: Tech Preview of Docker Desktop for M1

#58

Post by geofft »

stephenr wrote: post #23
diveanon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad, if they had it running natively I would actively consider switching back to mac. Glad to see they are making progress on the M1 port though, my team will be excited.

... if docker ran “natively” it’d mean using kernel hooks provided by xnu, which means you’d be able to run another instance of macOS in a container. How is it so many people use docker but have zero fucking clue about how it works?

> which means you’d be able to run another instance of macOS in a container

This is not true, for multiple reasons. Strictly speaking it only means you'd be able to run another instance of Darwin in a container. And, as you surely know because your tone of voice implies you bear immense knowledge, a Docker-style container is not a full OS: it doesn't run an init or normal system daemons, so it wouldn't even be a full instance of Darwin, so it wouldn't have to support functionality only needed by launchd or system daemons (e.g. WindowServer). It would just need to let you run a stanalone program in a chroot + separate network, PID, and IPC namespace + apply resource controls.

Furthermore, since most people are using Docker for developing software that's going to run on Linux, there would be no real need to virtualize the parts of XNU that aren't also provided on Linux - notably all the Mach stuff. You'd just need to provide a BSD-style syscall API to programs in a container.

Re: Tech Preview of Docker Desktop for M1

#59

Post by jbirer »

arvindamirtaa wrote: post #48
jbirer wrote: post #44

Absolute disaster, this platform. The opacity and lack of early availability for development made for a really ugly adoption experience. I feel that people should not encourage this and vote with their money in the DevOps / Dev sector to discourage other companies from pulling the same stunt.

Lack of early availability? They sold $500 dev units specifically for this purpose.

They were not available for purchase by everyone.

Re: Tech Preview of Docker Desktop for M1

#60

Post by jbirer »

ehutch79 wrote: post #50
jbirer wrote: post #44

Absolute disaster, this platform. The opacity and lack of early availability for development made for a really ugly adoption experience. I feel that people should not encourage this and vote with their money in the DevOps / Dev sector to discourage other companies from pulling the same stunt.

Docker or M1 macs?

The M1 Macs. Docker is awesome.
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