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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

I am just worried about all my developer tools (Docker, VMware Fusion, VirtualBox, brew) all breaking switching to ARM.

Apple demoed Docker and Parallels at the Developer State of the Union, and has written a new Hypervisor.framework for the new Macs. I think it'll be fine (I'll be sure once VirtualBox gets working on it, with the amount of trouble they've had with the new Windows Hypervisor I hope it'll be faster).

Does any of this mean that Docker for Mac (ARM) will be less of an insane resource hog?

Docker for Mac isn’t on x86 so it seems likely it will continue not to be.

I thought they'd already confirmed that x86_64 virtualization won't be possible on Silicon?

If so that rules out a significant number of development use cases.

What I've been able to find is that Rosetta will run 64 bit Intel apps, but that won't help the likes of Parallels.

So there will be no way to run Windows/Intel in a VM? Or even Linux/Intel or older versions of Mac OS for that matter?

That's bad.

What Apple has said is that you can't run existing x86 virtualization applications on top of Rosetta 2. So you can't take the copy of Parallels you have today and run it on Rosetta 2. Which make sense, since that would be running emulation on top of an emulation--likely to be super slow.

Instead, what you will do is get a new version of x86 virtualization applications (like Parallels) that run directly on top of Apple Silicon--in other words, you use them instead of Rosetta 2, not on top of Rosetta 2. That's what easton is talking about, above.

X86 virtualization on top of an x86 CPU is a fairly trivial task. Running the same on top of ARM at reasonable speeds is much more difficult. What makes you think Parallels will be able to pull it off anytime soon?

Docker already runs fine on ARM Linux, I can't imagine porting to Apple's ARM flavor of Unix is that much harder

This isn't really how it works. I mean, it won't necessarily be difficult, but having it working on ARM Linux means very little for it working on macOS.

I disagree. On MacOS (x86) Docker runs inside a VM; which is running Linux (since Docker needs Linux kernel features). On the forthcoming ARM version of MacOS, it will need to run a VM, running the ARM version of linux.

So having Docker working on the ARM version of linux is a good portion of the work needed to get it to run on ARM MacOS. You still have to get the VM and communications setup done, but Apple has already said they have done much of that work.

Linux working on ARM is not new work at all.

But setting up a VM to run Linux on ARM on top of MacOS on ARM is new work

Those will be ok, I’m thinking of R packages I use which build FORTRAN code on installation.

If they build on installation, then Apple just needs to make sure they have build tools ready. That's easy pickings compared to porting individual packages or apps.

gcc is not supported on the Apple Silicon yet. So anything that relies on that is going to be an issue.

I'm sure they'll tout some new "Rosetta" feature like they had for the switch from PowerPC to Intel last time

They already have–but not for virtualization, it's just for apps.

Isn’t brew just ruby scripts?

Yes, but it builds a whole lot of software that does things like hardcode "10.x" as a macOS version number or treat "ARM Darwin" as iPhone.

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