Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

But the migration to ARM is proving to be quite a pain point. Not being able to just do things as I would on x86-64 is damaging my productivity and creating a necessity for horrible workarounds.

As far as I know none of our pipelines yet do multi-arch Docker builds, so everything we have is heavily x86-64 oriented. VirtualBox is out of the picture because it doesn't support ARM. That means other tools that rely on it are also out of the picture, like Molecule. My colleague wrote a sort of wrapper script that uses Multipass instead but Multipass can't do x86-on-ARM emulation.

I've been using Lima to create virtual machines which works quite well because it can do multiple architectures. I haven't tested it on Linux though, and since it claims to be geared towards macOS that worries me. We are a company using a mix of MacBooks and Linux machines so we need a tool that will work for everyone.

The virtualisation situation on MacBooks in general isn't great. I think Apple introduced Virtualization.framework to try and improve things but the performance is actually worse than QEMU. You can try enabling it in the Docker Desktop experimental options and you'll notice it gets more sluggish. Then there's just other annoyances, like having to run a VM in the background for Docker all the time because 'real' Docker is not possible on macOS. Sometimes I'll have three or more VMs going and everything except my browser is paying that virtualisation penalty.

Ugh. Again, I love the performance and battery life, but the fragmentation this has created is a nightmare.

How is your experience so far? Any tips/tricks?

For developers using VMs, Docker, multi-pass, etc I think it is more trouble than it is worth to jump on to the new shiny thing and invest time in workarounds that break on a new update. At least you weren't part of the November 2020 launch day chaos otherwise you would be waiting 6 months to do any work if you went all in on the M1.

Looks like Intel is (still) the way to go for VMs until Apple Silicon gets better (eventually).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26159495

But apart from that it’s been incredibly smooth.

For actually creating multi-arch, I recommend you stay as far away as possible from Docker and use Podman and Buildah. The latter unbundles some of the Docker manifest commands, giving you far more control over how you create multi-arch images. I wasted 4 months on Docker tooling, and got it right in half a week with Podman. This meant switching from DCT (Podman doesn't support this at all) to Cosign, but Cosign is far more sensible than DCT.

There are a rare few containers that you can get away with running on x86.