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Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

Not just that, but if you're not running ARM images then it's running a VM for your docker images to boot. It's just mind-blowing how many containers I have running and my laptop is cool to the touch, and at full battery.

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You’re running a VM either way on a Mac. Docker without a VM is only available on Linux.

EDIT I get your intent though because it runs better when the images match the host.

Yep! But at least it can leverage hyperkit and vastly reduce overhead when running images of matching architecture.

hyperkit does not run on ARM Macs

  $ brew install hyperkit
  hyperkit: The x86_64 architecture is required for this software.
  Error: hyperkit: An unsatisfied requirement failed this build.

Oh I didn't realize, thanks for pointing that out. I guess they'll have to rely on the new virtualization framework going forward.

MacOS can run MacOS containers natively, but I understand that's not much help for most people.

https://macoscontainers.org/

Yeah, but that also requires disabling SIP, so you still might want to run it in a VM.

Aw. I wish there was a way to isolate corpoware crap like Citrix into its own little jail. Kinda like {tool,distro}box on Linux.

That’s interesting. It’s in 0.0.1 version though but it seems like a possible drop in replacement

Without network, IPC, PID and cgroup namespaces replacements it's not even close. How Windows Server does it? By using parts of Hyper-V.

And on Windows while running Windows containers.

Before anyone else gets confused...Windows containers are only for Windows applications. If you have a Linux environment in your Docker image, then it's running on a VM. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscont...

Of course, what is there to be confused about?

It say it clearly on the name, Windows containers.

This isn't as much the case anymore. There are typically arm64 images available for the more popular images, and anything you build locally is native, unless you're trying to build x86 software.

Redis, Memcached, PostgreSQL, MySQL- it's all native arm64 images now.

Even using ARM images you still need a VM because the MacOS kernel is not a Linux kernel, and containers rely on features of that kernel.

That only really helps if you also want to deploy on arm64. Developing on one architecture and deploying on another would kind of destroy on of the advantages of containers.

> if you're not running ARM images

The point was that there is rarely a reason to not run ARM images, since they’re widely available.

If I’m running M3 images on my Ryzen, performance is gonna be horrible, but why would I?

Today? Sure. Thus my statement, which came with a caveat about not running ARM images, the implication being that it's a rare thing today.

Do note that cool to the touch is a bad thing if the internals are otherwise hot

If the all-aluminum chassis remains cool to the touch despite boiling internals, that's impressive in its own right :-)

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