A lot of developer-centric focus discussion on how Docker would work (hint: it does), but VirtualBox is still pretty common in the sysadmin world and other industry circles. Moreover, there seems to be no way it will ever work. It will be interesting to see how that turns out.
ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization
51–60 of 313 posts
Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization
#52Apple will singlehandedly make 2021 "the year of Linux on the desktop".
To give a different perspective: I find Apple's move to ARM the most exciting thing to happen in desktop computers in many years. I'm typing this from a PC running Win10. Current plan is: as soon as ARM desktop Macs become available (and assuming they don't screw it up in some weird way), I'd like to switch.
Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization
#53This is ridiculous. Your code will just have to support multiple architectures, which is very easy with modern languages and tooling.
I think you missed the point. What about all the dependencies of your code that are only compiled for x86_64? The article isn't talking about native apps on the laptop, it's about apps that run on a server but that you are developing locally. You can't run your x86 docker image on your ARM mac without emulation. You can't run your x86 Windows VM without emulation etc. Of course there are solutions like using a remote…
Do you have any examples of this? The last time I tried an AWS ARM server, it was literally no modification other than changing the server type — Linux has run on ARM for many years and Apple is far from the first company to use the platform.
For example, back in 2017 Cloudflare was basically looking at this as a question of which hardware ran most cost-effectively rather than having engineering heroics first: https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/
Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization
#54Apple has their own virtualization offering to share and they are being quite coy about
Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization
#55This is ridiculous. Your code will just have to support multiple architectures, which is very easy with modern languages and tooling.
I think you missed the point. What about all the dependencies of your code that are only compiled for x86_64? The article isn't talking about native apps on the laptop, it's about apps that run on a server but that you are developing locally. You can't run your x86 docker image on your ARM mac without emulation. You can't run your x86 Windows VM without emulation etc. Of course there are solutions like using a remote…
AWS has put out some very impressive ARM instances running on the Graviton2 processors. The reviews I read show better performance per dollar. So maybe the solution is to further embrace ARM and run your code on ARM servers?
Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization
#56Do we know that Boot Camp isn’t supported by Big Sur? Or is it just that one can’t run an x86 OS on an ARM architecture? In other words - will I still be able to dual-boot into something like ARM-flavored Linux?
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Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization
#57This 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?
Parallels on Arm macOS simulates the Snapdragon 835 SoC to emulated operating systems.
Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization
#58> 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…
>>> expect ... a lot of common Docker images being built with ARM versions out of the box. This has no chance of happening. The common cloud CI systems do not support ARM at all (travis, circle CI and co). There is only a minority of developers with macbook and the rest is not going to spend $2000 to buy one just to build some docker images.
Travis has ARM in beta:
https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/multi-cpu-architectures
GitHub lists it as a feature now:
https://github.com/features/actions
I'd be very surprised if this didn't become more common given the high levels of interest people are showing towards ARM server offerings in the cloud space.
Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization
#59I'm more convinced dropping dual boot and supporting virtualization is the right move.
Only the host OS is going to have the right drivers for the trackpad, wi-fi, GPU, power management, etc. etc. Through virtualization, the guest OS doesn't have to worry about constantly evolving hardware models.
Virtualized OS performance is already very good, and USB passthrough has existed for a while. Snapshots are a godsend.
What won't work are things like CUDA for eGPUs over Thunderbolt 3, and you'll have to share disk and RAM with the host OS.
But for most use cases it's probably the right choice. (This doesn't address the author's concern about moving away from x86.)
Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization
#60It is very likely that ARM-based Macs will lack a performant hypervisor upon release. We will have to see how VMWare responds. I'd bet it will inspire new products and innovation and the desktop space will move towards a less x86-x64 centric world. In the end it is a short term problem. Someone will respond and provide a performant hypervisor that can run on an ARM host and virtualize x86-x64 and ARM guests. It's tru…
VMWare did have a hypervisor for Raspberry Pi.
Yes, VMWare ESXi runs on Arm just fine. :-)