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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

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.

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