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Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my naïveté regarding Podman. On macOS, does this use the same virtualization approach that docker desktop uses?

To run Linux containers you will always need Linux somewhere. On macOS this would be in a VM that's usually managed by the tooling. Docker Desktop, Rancher Desktop, lima, and others all do this. On Windows you have the Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 that uses a VM.

For simplicity, the tooling often tries to make this simple and transparent to use.

Fun fact: in Linux, Docker Desktop also uses a managed VM.

https://docs.docker.com/desktop/faqs/linuxfaqs/#why-does-doc...

Yeah that's the worst thing docker did

It sorta makes sense for a bunch of reasons:

1. You only have to deal with one Linux distro in the VM. Managing things across many distros can be difficult at that level.

2. There are times you want to blow away your environment. Can't do this if things running on the host.

3. You'll want to controll the resources your workloads uses so they don't make the Linux desktop unresponsive. VMs provide that level of separation.

I could go on but you get the point. If you're a power user who wants it on the host you can do that. For the masses of this kind of product, a VM has a lot of advantages.

If its hardware accelerated the performance difference would likely not matter. And you're not going to deploy a high performance container on a desktop environment since edit:[the desktop] will consume a much greater deal of resources from your host than the VM ever will. For deploying a development environment or self-hosted services it's fine.

It sure does. It crippled my intern gaming laptop just later found out that she is using docker desktop instead of docker.io in Linux.after reinstalling that , there's no visible performance problems running containers

Yes. Perhaps OrbStack[1] is what you're looking for.

[1] https://orbstack.dev/

Orbstack also uses a virtual machine.

How does it work? Why is it fast?

OrbStack uses a lightweight Linux virtual machine with tightly-integrated, purpose-built services and networking written in a mix of Swift, Go, Rust, and C. See Architecture for more details.

It's using Apple Virtualization Framework + Rosetta acceleration instead of third party hypervisor like QEMU. There are ways to do this via the CLI with a simple one line command if you have Xcode installed.

Thanks I’m gonna try it out. Sucks that it’s closed source but I do so much work in containers these days that it’s worth it just for the speed

Thank you for that link!

It's a very interesting product, it does use a VM, but seems to have some "special sauce" code to improve the speed of things. It also says it shares the kernel among multiple VMs. Very cool stuff.

Its using this:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization

Dev here — there's a lot more special sauce than that! https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture

Interesting, I thought Docker Desktop was doing that too. When I have time (HA!) I will try to compare podman/orb/docker a bit more.

Same basic approach in that it is a Linux VM that actually runs the containers, but it is based on qemu instead of VirtualBox.

Is Docker still using a VirtualBox based solution? I thought they were using the macOS virt framework.

No, it has never used virtual box. Originally it used hypervisor.framework. I wouldn't be surprised if they now use the virtualization framework (newer higher-level abstraction on macOS).

I doubt they're using VirtualBox. VirtualBox didn't even run on Apple Silicon until 9 months ago, but Docker Desktop still worked, so it must have been using something else.

colima allows to chose between qemu and apple virtualization framework.

I found there is not much diffence in performance between both on my intel macbook.

I think it will not take long until rancher also updates to latest lima to support apple virtualization. but I haven't checked the latest release notes.

That's because QEMU can do hardware acceleration in an x86 host but not in M architecture. But as far as I know, only the Apple framework can do hardware acceleration or use Rosetta 2 to make things near native speed on an M-series Mac.

Yes.

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