I’m curious how orbstack is able to achieve the performance they claim.
OrbStack: The fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux
21–30 of 161 posts
Re: OrbStack: The fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux
#22I have been happily using OrbStack for a while now, and I've had nothing but good experiences. The UI is polished and responsive, the containers have great performance and nice integration with the host, and overall the product seems to be constantly pushing itself to be even better. I admit my greatest confusion about this software is how a product that appears to be a one-man show so quickly became more compelling…
I’ll let the actual developer respond but OrbStack has several people working on it now.
Re: OrbStack: The fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux
#23Nice to see this here :) I work on OrbStack. Happy to answer questions!
What’s the security model for OrbStack and its containers?
Is OrbStack rootless? Where is the security boundary for the containers? (Are they sandboxed completely from the host?)
How does the virtualisation work? (I’d assume Virtualization.framework, so I can run it without Rosetta if all containers will share host architecture?)
Does it support Docker-in-Docker and Docker-out-of-Docker? (M1 and M2 Mac’s don’t have hardware for nested virtualisation so I assume this also prevents DiD with OrbStack?)
Thanks in advance, eager to try it out.
Re: OrbStack: The fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux
#24I’m curious how orbstack is able to achieve the performance they claim.
They have an architecture overview here: https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture
Re: OrbStack: The fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux
#25I have been happily using OrbStack for a while now, and I've had nothing but good experiences. The UI is polished and responsive, the containers have great performance and nice integration with the host, and overall the product seems to be constantly pushing itself to be even better. I admit my greatest confusion about this software is how a product that appears to be a one-man show so quickly became more compelling…
Love to hear that. We're actually a small team at OrbStack now!
Re: OrbStack: The fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux
#26I love that you can simply type `orb` and get dropped into a Linux vm. Some of the cpu features are super weird (cat /proc/cpuinfo and it is unlike literally any x86 cpu I've seen before), but unless you happen to build stuff that depends on lots of specific cpu features like I do, it works well enough.
I assume it matches whatever Rosetta advertises?
It's because Rosetta doesn't seem to emulate /proc/cpuinfo, so the contents reflect that of the arm64 host.
Re: OrbStack: The fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux
#27Nice to see this here :) I work on OrbStack. Happy to answer questions!
What’s the security model for OrbStack and its containers? Is OrbStack rootless? Where is the security boundary for the containers? (Are they sandboxed completely from the host?) How does the virtualisation work? (I’d assume Virtualization.framework, so I can run it without Rosetta if all containers will share host architecture?) Does it support Docker-in-Docker and Docker-out-of-Docker? (M1 and M2 Mac’s don’t have h…
It's a shared VM and kernel, so the security boundary between containers is only as strong as typical Linux containers, and we don't really use the VM as a strong security boundary right now. The security model is similar to running Docker containers on a native Linux machine for development.
Admin privileges aren't required on the macOS side. You can optionally allow a privileged helper for some small niceties, but the VM process never runs as root.
The virtualization stack is custom, which allows for a lot of performance and stability improvements. It's not Virtualization.framework or QEMU.
Containers don't require virtualization, so Docker-in-Docker works. Not sure what you mean by Docker-out-of-Docker, but you can run Docker in OrbStack Linux machines, and you can use the managed engine from macOS.
Re: OrbStack: The fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux
#28I don't generally prefer to work on macOS, but if I wind up using macOS to do work, I often find myself working a lot on things in virtual machines and containers. Using Docker Desktop to compile Envoy using the standard Docker build process took somewhere in the ball park of 3 to 4 hours depending on my luck. OrbStack, on the other hand, brought it down to a bit under an hour, much closer to inline with a fresh comp…
Funny how WSL2 makes Windows much more usable than macOS for development. None of the free options (colima, multipass, etc) I've tried on macOS are as smooth, though OrbStack might be it. I have also moved towards using devcontainers for my projects whenever I can, so that I can spin up my environment on whatever machine I have, or connect to a remote one if the machine doesn't allow it.
Only because it is a Linux VM, and people insist on using Linux specific stuff instead of UNIX, to the point younger generations have no clue about the difference.
Even the BSDs and Solaris/Illumos have add to add Linux translation layers.
Sad state where POSIX hardly matters for portable UNIX code.
Re: OrbStack: The fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux
#29Nice to see this here :) I work on OrbStack. Happy to answer questions!
Please keep in mind I’m asking with genuine interest as I am a happy OrbStack user otherwise, (for private use).
What is the reason Orbstack needs a connection to your license server for continued operation?
I was moving and during nearly a month there was no home internet. My server was happily chugging along on wifi though, but one day I connected to it and saw a message that OrbStack couldn’t contact the license server and soon stop functioning.
This put me off a bit and made me consider whether I want to run anything I depend on using this.
Re: OrbStack: The fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux
#30I switched to Orbstack about 2 weeks ago after having read about it here on HN.
I develop a cloud native system entirely writen in Rust. All my own containers are build without Docker thanks to rules oci in Bazel. However, for integration testing, I'm using internal tools that fire up, say a database container and run the tests all from within Bazel to leverage test caching and parallelization.
For a while, i was struggling to get around Dockers slow startup time on Mac. My CI server uses Firecracker VM's to isolate OCI containers so it's really only a docker on Mac issue.
My main take away:
- I am so close to delete Docker permanently. There is no comparison, not even close. All integration tests run so much faster.
- Especially parallel container starts a noticable faster.
- I've developed custom docker utils for testing and, believe me, the official Docker API is a humongous pile of garbage that I ended up re-implementing everything by wrapping the Docker command line. To nobody's surprise, even the custom docker utils work way faster and more reliable with OrbStack.
- Zero issues. I am still a little bit puzzled that OrbStack basically runs bug-free no matter what I throw at it. Take it as a compliment.
What I would like to see:
- A Ressource monitor or at least some graph that plots CPU and memory usage. In some rare cases the application in the container runs close to the limit probably because a query takes too long, a process got stuck or whatever. Stuff just happenens. Point is, having an eye on ressource usage helps to spot those corner cases early on.
For me, OrbStack is a clear win and a clear keeper. Well done Orb team and I wish you guys all the success in the world.