Did you know Docker Desktop runs a virtual machine on your computer? | Hacker News Reader

Did you know Docker Desktop runs a virtual machine on your computer?

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A "fun" thing about Docker Desktop on Windows is that it requires Hyper-V. And it so happens that Hyper-V is usually incompatible with AMD SVN (Their virtualization acceleration). So it's impossible to simulatenously use VirtualBox and Docker Desktop, unless you're okay with horrible performance on the latter.

Personally, i think that VirtualBox is really nice as far as virtualization software goes (the UI in particular having good usability), but admittedly Hyper-V is also good for when you cannot run it.

That said, for a while i actually ran VirtualBox on some of my homelab servers as a really simple hypervisor, since software like RemoteBox kept the familiar and easy to use UI and allowed me to use it as a desktop app: https://remotebox.knobgoblin.org.uk/?page=about

Of course, Docker Desktop also supports WSL2 on Windows instead of Hyper-V, so it's not like you're always forced to use it: https://docs.docker.com/desktop/windows/wsl/

On an unrelated note, Rancher Desktop also seems promising: https://rancherdesktop.io/

WSL2 requires hyper-v, so you need it for Docker either way.

Huh.

Seems like it's more interesting than that: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/issues/899

> ...for WSL2 you only need "Virtual Machine Platform" (a subset of Hyper-V) and "Windows Subsystem for Linux" features, both available in Home edition.

Also there's this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/faq#will-i-be-a...

> However, recently both VirtualBox and VMware have released versions that support Hyper-V and WSL2. Learn more about VirtualBox's changes here and VMware's changes here. For troubleshooting issues, take a look at the VirtualBox issue discussions in the WSL repo on GitHub.

I'm running both Docker and VirtualBox on my 5950x in Win11; don't remember doing anything special, but VirtualBox chose Hyper-V as the hypervisor technology, maybe it didn't default to that for you.

Am I getting confused or didn’t you used to have to install VirtualBox to run Docker Desktop on macOS?

I don’t see this in their installation instructions any more…

docker-machine, which predated Docker Desktop, used VirtualBox; you may be thinking of that. I don't think Docker Desktop ever used VirtualBox.

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