- Fast networking: 30 Gbps! vs. 150 Mbps with Docker VPNKit. Full VPN compatibility, IPv6, ping, ICMP and UDP traceroute, and half-open TCP connections. (Future work: transparent proxies)
- Bidirectional filesystem sharing: fast VirtioFS to access macOS from Linux, but there's also access to the Linux filesystem from macOS. This can help with performance: for example, you could store code in Linux and edit it from macOS with VS Code (which can take the performance hit of sharing), so the container runs with native FS speed.
- Not limited to Docker or Kubernetes. You can run multiple full Linux distros as system containers (like WSL) so they share resources.
- Fast x86 emulation with Rosetta
- Bidirectional CLI integration like WSL
- Much lower background CPU usage. Only ~0.05% CPU usage and 2-5 idle wakeups per second — less than most apps, while Docker wakes up ~120 times per second. Made possible with low-level kernel optimizations. Also, no Electron!
- Better solutions to other problems that can occur on macOS: clock drift is corrected monotonically, dynamic disk size, and more I'm working on now. Will look into memory usage too, although I can't guarantee a good fix for that.
- No root needed
Planning to release it as a paid app later this month. Not OSS, but I think the value proposition is pretty good and there will be a free trial. Not sure about pricing yet. (Let me know if you have any thoughts on this!)
If anyone is interested, drop me an email (see bio) and I'll let you know when this is ready for testing, likely within a week or two at most :)
Also, feel free to ask questions here or let me know if there are other warts you'd like to see fixed.