ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

It didn’t take months, the time I did it (running Docker on a Pinebook, which was not a great experience). It took a couple of hours to flip some base images away from Alpine, as Debian already has a load of ARM packages built.

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

#5

Post by user5994461 » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

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.

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

#6

Post by maxmcd » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:19 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.

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.

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

#7

Post by jjoonathan » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

If you stay back on x86 virtualization will be slow, but if you jump to ARM this is great!

> However, this would take months

(infomercial arms)

I'm sure it won't make sense for everyone, but I'm just as sure it will make sense for many.

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

#8

Post by marricks » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

It will be extremely interesting to see what the dev's say with the test boxes. Curious if there's any magical fixes like switching over to ARM Linux, since the software of an image would likely be compiled for x86 I really doubt it...

Perhaps this will spur some people over to running ARM servers in the cloud...

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

#9

Post by core-questions » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

> 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 versions out of the box. It might be about a year or so, but eventually we'll be able to just go ARM-native the whole way.

What Apple needs to do is make a first-class, WSL-tier implementation of Docker for Mac for ARM.

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

#10

Post by dlivingston » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

Do 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?