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LXD containers on macOS at near-native speeds

beringresearch.github.io

1–10 of 134 posts

Re: LXD containers on macOS at near-native speeds

#2
This is good news.

I come from the development background and the number one use case of containers on macOS is development enviroments, as on Windows too. For this use case, file system IO has always been bottleneck, not CPU. I do not know if there is some silver bullet in the horizon that could make this faster.

Re: LXD containers on macOS at near-native speeds

#5
post #2

This is good news. I come from the development background and the number one use case of containers on macOS is development enviroments, as on Windows too. For this use case, file system IO has always been bottleneck, not CPU. I do not know if there is some silver bullet in the horizon that could make this faster.

I've been really impressed with what I can accomplish with lima-vm, beyond just "replace docker desktop". The latest pre-release supports Virtualization.framework, including virtiofs.

Re: LXD containers on macOS at near-native speeds

#6
I experimented with LXD containers on Linux recently, but I found the technology it builds on (cgroups) too hard to wrap my head around, and tutorials leave me in the dark.

E.g. here is page 2 of one tutorial: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

All these rules made no sense to me, and while I suppose they become clear at some point, I like my tutorials to be clear from the start.

Re: LXD containers on macOS at near-native speeds

#7
post #2

This is good news. I come from the development background and the number one use case of containers on macOS is development enviroments, as on Windows too. For this use case, file system IO has always been bottleneck, not CPU. I do not know if there is some silver bullet in the horizon that could make this faster.

I've been really impressed with what I can accomplish with lima-vm, beyond just "replace docker desktop". The latest pre-release supports Virtualization.framework, including virtiofs.

I am also happy with Lima on my M1 Macs. I wanted a Intel Linux container to run picolisp and it was easy to set up and works nicely.

Re: LXD containers on macOS at near-native speeds

#9
post #3

> Prerequisites Install QEMU So in other words, qemu runs at near-native speeds?

QEMU can use the MacOS virtualization framework layer to run a VM built for the same arch without going through any translation.

From there you can register Rosetta as a runtime and use it to run x86-64 Linux apps on ARM64 if you want. (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...)

Re: LXD containers on macOS at near-native speeds

#10
post #6

I experimented with LXD containers on Linux recently, but I found the technology it builds on (cgroups) too hard to wrap my head around, and tutorials leave me in the dark. E.g. here is page 2 of one tutorial: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... All these rules made no sense to me, and while I suppose they become clear at some point, I like my tutorials to be clear from the start.

lxd is so much easier than alternatives like systemd-nspawn.

3 minutes search reveals an easy to follow tutorial.

https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/containers-lxd

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