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Comment by jcollins | Hacker News Reader

Docker Desktop already ran on Macs. This is specifically for the new Apple Silicon support (M1). It's not native, technically, but it feels native the way Docker Desktop works. Basically they manage the VM for you, so you don't have too.

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It doesnt feel native at all, performance and networking are very suboptimal.

Haven't tested it on M1 yet, but I doubt the networking challenges will disappear.

There is overhead for sure but if you use x86 containers on an Intel Mac or arm64 containers on an Apple Silicon mac, it's pretty performant.

Can you share any details on M1 perf and resource consumption? Docker vm on mac is noticeably slower and consumes a lot of resources in my experience.

The only thing I can say with confidence is that if you're using ARM containers it is really fast, probably thanks to the Apple Silicon.

I imagine memory consumption is on par with running on Intel. I don't think Docker Desktop can really change that.

Honestly memory is the primary constraint for most of my mac devs running our docker envs.

Can this run a container of windows on Mac M1?

You can run Windows For ARM on M1 Macs right now, I doubt you can get docker to do this without lots of manual effort.

Got a link to proof of this?

https://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg766282... for the Qemu patches

and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsins... for downloading the Windows build

Question, is there persistence with that? Or are changes lost once it is closed?

I've been using the ACVM app with. Windows 10 VMDK file. Changes are indeed persisted to the VMDK

No nested virtualisation present currently, as such no virtualization support provided to VMs, so on Windows on an M1 only WSL1 works. Docker Linux containers on Windows require WSL2 instead.

Docker Windows containers aren't available on arm64 Windows yet, but stay tuned...

Can you run a container of Windows on an x86 machine? The answer is no, and for the same reason it won’t work on ARM. A “container” is not a virtual machine, you can only run the same Linux executables you would on a normal Linux system.

That said, as another person commented, you can run Windows for ARM in a VM on an Apple M1.

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