macOS Container Machines • Hacker News Board

Re: macOS Container Machines

#91

Post by kdrag0n » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:45 AM UTC

mescalito wrote: post #82

kdrag0n wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

That's my bad, I used the example alpine commands and the official alpine doesn't have init. It's supported if you build an image with systemd installed

Re: macOS Container Machines

#92

Post by twoodfin » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:47 AM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #87

Is 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.

What would be the advantages over a VM infrastructure Apple needs anyway and that has a much simpler, more stable “ABI” compared to the Linux kernel?

Re: macOS Container Machines

#93

Post by _blk » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:49 AM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #90

LoganDark wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

... Now it's just called git bash

Re: macOS Container Machines

#94

Post by imglorp » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:50 AM UTC

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #14

namegulf wrote: post #4

Would be nice if they also support Intel based macs, what prevents?

[flagged]

I'll defend, not cringe for everyone.

Daily driver is a 6yo, 32Mb mbp and it might not scream like an M5 or have the miraculous power draw of an M5, it gets my job done.

One nice thing is x86 containers run natively: I run most of my $work landscape which is 40 or 50 k8s pods on top of Kind, which is itself a plain container. That mirrors my prod. That plus slack, zoom, ff with scores of tabs, etc. all while building rust and playing music.

Re: macOS Container Machines

#95

Post by groundzeros2015 » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:51 AM UTC

m132 wrote: post #85

Every 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.

Just change 30 years of internet history

Re: macOS Container Machines

#96

Post by ahknight » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:51 AM UTC

m132 wrote: post #85

Every 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.

[dead]

Re: macOS Container Machines

#97

Post by tw04 » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:53 AM UTC

m132 wrote: post #85

Every 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.

What is the alternative? They gave up the server market a decade ago and before that they barely actually supported it.

If they were to support darwin containers, what would be the point? Literally nobody would build to it, Linux won.

Re: macOS Container Machines

#98

Post by ahknight » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:53 AM UTC

llimllib wrote: post #31

Is this new? I thought we had this already In my testing (iirc) filesystem performance was not good enough to be usable with node/rust dev where lots of small files get stat-ed update: what's new is the `container machine` subcommand. I went to test it out, but container failed to run at all for me: https://github.com/apple/container/issues/1681

Podman is on macOS, FWIW. Uses the existing container framework to run the machine already. Root-full or not.

Re: macOS Container Machines

#99

Post by nozzlegear » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:55 AM UTC

thejazzman wrote: post #8

jaimehrubiks wrote: post #3

Will this be able to replace docker desktop an equivalents, removing the expensive Linux VM that runs alongside them?

It mostly removes the big shared background VM and replaces it with smaller, more isolated Apple-native VMs. I did an experiment migrating my Podman workload to Apple's container @ https://gist.github.com/jmonster/39e14585e107dbf990a90966c0f... TL;DR reduces ram/storage usage; minimizes it's existence

Nice, thanks for this. My plan is to swap over to Apple's containers for local dev, and keep using podman quadlets in production.

Re: macOS Container Machines

#100

Post by michaelsbradley » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:55 AM UTC

_blk wrote: post #93

TylerE wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

... Now it's just called git bash

Just install and use MSYS2, git bash is derived from it anyway, and a regular MSYS2 installation offers a lot more.