Would be nice if they also support Intel based macs, what prevents?
[flagged]
More power to ya!
macOS Container Machines
81–90 of 457 posts
Re: macOS Container Machines
#82OrbStack works really well for me. I wonder how it’s compared to this performance wise
(OrbStack dev here.) Instead of Virtualization.framework, we have a custom Rust virtualization stack with custom devices and protocols for things like filesystem sharing. It's a highly optimized vertically integrated stack specifically for running our Linux machines and containers. Our biggest perf/resource gain is dynamic memory, which reduces memory usage a lot by releasing unused memory back to macOS. Nothing else…
Super happy orbstack customer. Just curious on your statement:
> I gave Container Machines a try and it seems to be much closer to OCI containers with a default bind mount than OrbStack machines. It has fewer integrations and doesn't run systemd or any other normal init system, so it's hard to run services.
The linked md document says:
> Real Linux services for testing. Run a database or whatever your stack needs as a system service — systemctl start postgresql works on images with systemd installed.
Was that not the case when you used container machines?
Re: macOS Container Machines
#83OrbStack works really well for me. I wonder how it’s compared to this performance wise
Not a full docker env, I aimed this as doing builds though you can run dockerd as an option, https://github.com/cpuguy83/crucible uses the containerization framework to run either build kitd or dockerd and wire it up to docker/buildx cli (or whatever client tooling you want to use).
The Containerization framework is a library that sits as a layer on top of the virtualization framework. So each container is its own VM.
Machine is tooling above the containerization framework to run multiple things in a container in a vm.
Re: macOS Container Machines
#84Would be cool if you can redirect USB devices to the VM.
Agreed! There's some good improvements around Accessory Access in virtualization framework this year also - checkout: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/224/?time=2...
I wonder if the custom virtio can be used to support attaching the built-in sdcard readers on macs which aren't exposed as usb.
Re: macOS Container Machines
#85Every time I see Apple flaunting Linux containers I can hardly consider it as anything but admitting defeat. It could easily be Darwin, if they still had the capacity.
Re: macOS Container Machines
#86Is this similar to what cygwin was for windows? Could this be an alternative to homebrew?
Re: macOS Container Machines
#87Is there any reason why macOS doesn't try a WSL1 style approach? I get why that didn't fully work out for windows, but it seems like macOS being another *nix would make a lot of what was hard for windows, easy for mac. It seems like it should be possible to run most linux applications natively on macOS with few additional new APIs.
BSD actually has this already.
Re: macOS Container Machines
#88I'm surprised they cared enough to do this. I'd still rather use Linux but MacBook value is incredible.
I'd always rather use Linux, but sometimes your employer gives you a MacBook. I might use this tool.
Re: macOS Container Machines
#89Re: macOS Container Machines
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only WSL2; WSL1 was an actual subsystem.
WSL1 was so cool, WSL2 made it boring and isolated.
Back in my day you to to download a couple GB worth of cygwin, and that wasn't an actual environment, basically just a GNU toolchain compiled for windows. But it got you like....grep and bash and stuff that ran natively on windows which was kinda cool.