ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization • Hacker News Board

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#11

Post by henryfjordan » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

maxmcd wrote: post #6

lachlan-sneff wrote: post #2

This is ridiculous. Your code will just have to support multiple architectures, which is very easy with modern languages and tooling.

Yeah, ARM is coming and docker will move to support it. We already have this: https://docs.docker.com/buildx/working-with-buildx/ Things like the pinebook pro (and hopefully more linux ARM devices) will keep pushing this further.

Docker came to the ARM-based raspberry pi in 2016: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/docker-comes-to-raspberry-p...

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#12

Post by rbanffy » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #5

Didn't think of that. If running Docker is 10 times slower on ARM and virtual box doesn't support the architecture at all, this might indeed end developers using Mac.

Running Docker on an emulated x86 will be slow, but I doubt it'd be 10x slower. There are snapdragon laptops running Windows. How much slower is running Docker on them?

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#13

Post by Spivak » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

lachlan-sneff wrote: post #2

This is ridiculous. Your code will just have to support multiple architectures, which is very easy with modern languages and tooling.

I mean the post is technically right. You're probably better of skipping the first generation of ARM Macs until software support happens unless you're someone who wants to work on that software support.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#14

Post by jeremyjh » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

My 2017 Macbook pro still has quite a lot of life in it, but it seems unlikely I will replace it with another Mac in a few years. Before the Mac I had a Lenovo X1 Carbon running Linux and it was great; and even then was a better development environment in some ways (docker has better filesystem performance, pacman is much better than homebrew). I do use some audio processing applications and my kids play a few games that do not run at all on Linux. I may try WSL again instead of going straight back to Linux, but its hard to imagine Mac will be the best OS for me.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#15

Post by fluxem » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

But linux can be run on arm natively. Moreover, most packages are also compiled for arm. So apt-get install will work just the same. I'm sure they will be able to target Apple's specific arm chips when they come out.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#16

Post by jnwatson » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

lachlan-sneff wrote: post #2

This is ridiculous. Your code will just have to support multiple architectures, which is very easy with modern languages and tooling.

Hardly. You’re investing a great deal of effort in building a parallel set of images that probably will never see production.

The one use case when this might be viable is targeting AWS Graviton2. Does anybody know if you can run an emulated Graviton2 on ARM Mac?

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#17

Post by the-golden-one » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

m000 wrote: post #3

Apple will singlehandedly make 2021 "the year of Linux on the desktop".

I thought that was WSL2 on Windows 10?

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#18

Post by rbanffy » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

core-questions wrote: post #9

> Why can't you update the Docker image to also support ARM? You theoretically could switch your backend to run ARM Linux. However, this would take months - renting out ARM instances, re-building all repositories, and a tense switch over. I don't see why this would be so hard. If anything, I expect to see a massive upswing in things like AWS Graviton2 uptake, and a lot of common Docker images being built with ARM ver…

The Honeycomb.io folks reported 40% more capacity per dollar on Graviton 2 over x86. That alone should motivate people to start looking into ARM backends.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#19

Post by ris » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

If you hadn't sold yourself out of the free market, you would be able to choose what architecture machine you bought.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#20

Post by Spivak » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

core-questions wrote: post #9

> Why can't you update the Docker image to also support ARM? You theoretically could switch your backend to run ARM Linux. However, this would take months - renting out ARM instances, re-building all repositories, and a tense switch over. I don't see why this would be so hard. If anything, I expect to see a massive upswing in things like AWS Graviton2 uptake, and a lot of common Docker images being built with ARM ver…

I'm kinda thankful to Apple for biting the bullet on this one. For whatever reason people will move mountains for Apple where other companies' products would just languish and die. The second order effects of ARM being something that's "safe" for people to use should be great!