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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

If you're doing everything on Docker anyways it kind of doesn't matter, as Docker already runs on top of a linux virtual machine on OSX. As long as Apple puts in the effort to bridge their hypervisor framework[1] this should continue to work.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor

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The current Linux virtual machines use the x86's virtualisation instructions to run at almost native speed. That is not possible if the virtual machine has a different architecture to the host, and execution would be much slower.

If you click your own link, you'll quickly notice that the Hypervisor.framework API is incredibly x86-specific, for example one of the methods listed take parameters of type "hv_x86_reg_t".

Hypervisor.framework in its current design has nothing to offer for cross architecture emulation.

Even if this api was changed to provide arm hypervisor functionality, at best you'd probably be looking at an arm-linux-only variant of docker. Not very useful if you are planning on deploying to x86/x64 linux servers.

Windows on ARM performance for x86 emulation is about half that of native code - I'd expect comparable performance from Apple, though from a higher ARM baseline than Snapdragons.

If you’re using Docker you’re probably not using a Mac anyway, performance is already terrible.

Agreed, Docker on Mac performance is abysmal. Writing from a container to a shared volume yields sub-10MB/s write speeds and full load on at least two cores via hyperkit. I get that translating I/O between file systems is expensive but even Windows does this better. It's the number one reason why I'm looking into switching away from macOS right now.

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