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Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

podman-desktop.io

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Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#121

Post by elcritch »

LooerCell wrote: post #31

Recently I started using colima[0], a drop in replacement for Docker Desktop on Mac, and have seen an increase in performance and battery life. You can use all the normal docker and docker compose commands. It does not have a GUI but you can use the Docker extension on VS Code to have an overview of running containers. [0] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

Does anyone know if the networking lets you ping the docker vm directly?

Looks like there's an `colima start --network-address`. I just spent the day trying to get a docker vm I can ping directly.

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#122

Post by dboreham »

bakugo wrote: post #89
tyingq wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On windows, docker desktop can use Hyper-V, but it also supports WSL2 as a backend.

The WSL2 backend is pretty broken from my experience, it will often lock up using 100% CPU after I put my laptop into sleep/hibernation, and the only reliable way to bring it back seems to be killing the VM in task manager and restarting. Dunno if this is Windows' fault or Docker's though.

Not broken for me fwiw on four different machines, one is ARM.

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#123

Post by gbraad »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #38

Talking about containers: is there an easy way to run “system” containers? This is, containers that run systemd and everything else you would expect to be running on a normal Linux OS. I rely heavily on VMs to simulate cloud environments, but I would love to use lightweight containers instead. Also, these “system” containers should be able to run containers inside them as well (docker in docker?). I saw something on…

Not entirely sure about the usecase, but podman itself integrates well with systemd, like creating services. But it feels like you want a full systemd OS in a container instead of a VM. Not the best practice. VM might better for this, though Podman can run systemd based services. And Podman in docker or podman in podman is not an issue.

https://blog.while-true-do.io/podman-systemd-in-containers/

Podman machine starts a VM that is just a Fedora distro, with systemd and you can create multiple instances. This way you can run these system containers easily.

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#124

Post by dboreham »

moondev wrote: post #47

I have been experimenting with the arm64 windows dev kit, neither docker desktop, podman desktop or rancher desktop had arm64 builds. Installing the amd64 builds did not work either. I was surprised to find out wsl2 now supports systemd https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/systemd-support-i... I was able to install docker normally inside wsl2 and it worked perfectly. No "desktop" app needed. This will be a game…

I've been using this approach for some time on my Pro X. I wrote a script to start the docker daemon on first shell startup prior to systemd support.

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#125

Post by gpanders »

gbraad wrote: post #111
raro11 wrote: post #7

Docker Desktop for Mac released an experimental file sharing implementation back in March[0]. It made working with Docker bearable. Does anyone know how well Podman performs on Mac? Especially file sharing. Edit: A quick Google led me back to this HackerNews comment[1]. Looks like Docker for Mac is faster. [0] https://www.docker.com/blog/speed-boost-achievement-unlocked... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=323…

At the moment podman machine on macOS uses Qemu and their filesharing stack. Qemu allowed us to move quickly utilizing the same deployment stategy. However I work on CRC (a related project) and we have a driver based on virtualization framework using virtiofs. We hope to integrate this in `podman machine` soon as it will improve performance. Ideally we want to boot with the kernel and ramdisk provided by the image, t…

This is exciting news! Is there an issue or something similar I can subscribe to to track progress?

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#126

Post by seabrookmx »

moondev wrote: post #47

I have been experimenting with the arm64 windows dev kit, neither docker desktop, podman desktop or rancher desktop had arm64 builds. Installing the amd64 builds did not work either. I was surprised to find out wsl2 now supports systemd https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/systemd-support-i... I was able to install docker normally inside wsl2 and it worked perfectly. No "desktop" app needed. This will be a game…

Thanks for this! I was curious if the windows dev kit would be a good arm64 container build box, but I wasn't sure if getting Docker or buildah etc. on there would be a pain. Sounds like this is totally doable.

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#127

Post by reilly3000 »

elcritch wrote: post #121
LooerCell wrote: post #31

Recently I started using colima[0], a drop in replacement for Docker Desktop on Mac, and have seen an increase in performance and battery life. You can use all the normal docker and docker compose commands. It does not have a GUI but you can use the Docker extension on VS Code to have an overview of running containers. [0] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

Does anyone know if the networking lets you ping the docker vm directly? Looks like there's an `colima start --network-address`. I just spent the day trying to get a docker vm I can ping directly.

It’s been a really doozy for me too, doubly so for local k8s in Docker (kind/k3s). I’ve tried a whole lot of variations, it’s hard and harder to scale across hundreds of devices.

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#128

Post by gbraad »

anderspitman wrote: post #120
gbraad wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The virtiofs implementation we use is the native one provided by Apple according to our virtiofs spec. https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/ You can try running https://github.com/crc-org/crc with the podman preset (!) to test it. It would not be exactly the same how podman machine will use it eventually, but might help to give an idea of performance or issues we can improve on. We have seen a lot of users being more than con…

Thanks for the info. I don't actually use MacOS myself, but I'm interested in getting faster userspace networking and filesystem sharing for Linux and Windows hosts. virtiofs is interesting but it's unfortunate that it requires a daemon and AFAIK doesn't run on Windows hosts.

Right. HyperV only does eh... Well, they do 9P for WSL2, but not for HyperV itself. This is one of our issues. We work with the virtiofs team to get this resolved, but their implementation targets Linux first. We hope to see Microsoft adopting this too. We are glad to help. Especially as the current 9P implementation for WSL2 has known syncing and performance issues. On a VM you would have to resort to CIFS, sshfs or something else... Which are all not ideal for locally attached storage

The solution Vivek and Sergio work on is https://gitlab.com/virtio-fs/virtiofsd

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#129

Post by gbraad »

gbraad wrote: post #105
moondev wrote: post #47

I have been experimenting with the arm64 windows dev kit, neither docker desktop, podman desktop or rancher desktop had arm64 builds. Installing the amd64 builds did not work either. I was surprised to find out wsl2 now supports systemd https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/systemd-support-i... I was able to install docker normally inside wsl2 and it worked perfectly. No "desktop" app needed. This will be a game…

I work on the Windows enablement team of podman machine andam glad to take question or feature requests. We are looking into enabling systemd, though as said, this isn't GA yet. The functionality would only work for Win11, so we have to enable a win10 workaround for this (we have), but this has to be based on feature detection. Arm binaries is being looked at, but can't commit to a timeframe when this will be deliver…

Note: the Arm binary I suggest is an rnd to end solution with the WSL2 environment and client binaries.

If you dont mind some tinkering, a fedora Aarch64 container base image can be imported to wsl2 to install podman.

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#130

Post by chisquared »

LooerCell wrote: post #31

Recently I started using colima[0], a drop in replacement for Docker Desktop on Mac, and have seen an increase in performance and battery life. You can use all the normal docker and docker compose commands. It does not have a GUI but you can use the Docker extension on VS Code to have an overview of running containers. [0] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

Same. My requirements are very basic, so the switch to colima was basically seamless. I also appreciated being able to avoid Docker Desktop constantly trying to update itself (which is what ultimately motivated me to make the switch).

As a bonus, you can install the Docker CLI (e.g. `brew install --formula docker`) and use that to interact with any containers you start with colima.

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