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Comment by blahgeek | Hacker News Reader

OrbStack works really well for me. I wonder how it’s compared to this performance wise

(OrbStack dev here.) Instead of Virtualization.framework, we have a custom Rust virtualization stack with custom devices and protocols for things like filesystem sharing. It's a highly optimized vertically integrated stack specifically for running our Linux machines and containers.

Our biggest perf/resource gain is dynamic memory, which reduces memory usage a lot by releasing unused memory back to macOS. Nothing else supports this, including Containerization.

I gave Container Machines a try and it seems to be much closer to OCI containers with a default bind mount than OrbStack machines. It has fewer integrations and doesn't run systemd or any other normal init system, so it's hard to run services.

Thanks for the info kdrag0n! Big fan of OrbStack; good call out on dynamic memory.

If the guest image has /sbin/init, we use that.

We'd recommend using a base image for the guest that includes systemd. ie: https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/container-...

Just to give a thumbs up to you and OrbStack. I've been using it every day since the first releases, and it is one of the most stable and performant drop-in replacements that I've seen.

love to hear it!

Super happy orbstack customer. Just curious on your statement:

> I gave Container Machines a try and it seems to be much closer to OCI containers with a default bind mount than OrbStack machines. It has fewer integrations and doesn't run systemd or any other normal init system, so it's hard to run services.

The linked md document says:

> Real Linux services for testing. Run a database or whatever your stack needs as a system service — systemctl start postgresql works on images with systemd installed.

Was that not the case when you used container machines?

That's my bad, I used the example alpine commands and the official alpine doesn't have init. It's supported if you build an image with systemd installed

Apple says that `systemctl` is supported... hmm am I missing something?

"Real Linux services for testing. Run a database or whatever your stack needs as a system service — systemctl start postgresql works on images with systemd installed."

Good catch, I tried the example alpine commands and there was no init system. Makes sense if it's based on OCI images

Just tested it on on an OCI image with systemd and it works well. I can see the appeal of OrbStack regarding memory reallocation and will stick with it in the time being :)

just adding a 'hell yeah: orbstack is so good' to the thread. i mainly avoid containers where i can, but when containers need to happen, orbstack is 'just enough' for me. lovely and well considered ui, stable, performant. don't need much else. thank you for your work and care!

> Our biggest perf/resource gain is dynamic memory, which reduces memory usage a lot by releasing unused memory back to macOS. Nothing else supports this, including Containerization.

Wow, missed this when reviewing OrbStack. I assumed that you just used Containerization and therefore would have the same limitation.

I know this is off topic, but I do thank you for your Android work, the idea and elegance of fastboot.js and that SafetyNet workaround trick was truly really cool.

Ahh those were good times, glad you came across it :)

I changed over to Orbstack just for local builds and it is one of those apps that makes owning a Mac that much better.

This post reminded me to buy a license, just done it, worth it for the time saved.

just dropping in to say orbstack super owns and i use it every day. huge respect to rethinking this experience, for a minute there i thought docker was just going to be the only path. i dont think ive looked back for docker since. orbstack just feels right, and damn its so fast and good with resources, and the UI is just insanely straight forward. props!

We love OrbStack too! Thank you for it,

I wanted to make its VM/machine our default secure agent sandbox, but I couldn’t figure out how to isolate this VM from the host properly. This thread prompted me to find the issue though, and I saw this was recently implemented! https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/169

Yep! Still refining it but isolated machines now have fine-grained settings for filesystem mounts, network isolation, SSH agent forwarding, and CPU/memory/disk limits

I’ve been using podman on Mac. It’s been a nice fit as the container build files are identical to what I use on my fedora server. I have noticed my 2 virtual core 4 gb Linode vps runs apps faster in the same container as when run on my MacBook Air M2 16 gb. I expected some performance overhead but didn’t think it would be noticeable as it is. Overall happy with podman. How might OrbStack differ?

Having used both, it feels like OrbStack "just works" more than Podman. The main example of this is Supabase.

Those are awesome features! The one missing for me is bridge networking. Any idea why orbstack doesn’t have that?

https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/342

What kind of virtualization do you use internally? I assume some kind of LXD fork? OrbStack really feels like a single-node Incus host.

The Linux VM host and guest components are all custom, as well as the daemon that manages machines. It currently uses LXC as the runtime but that's being replaced as well. For containers we run a standard Docker engine inside a special machine.

I love orbstack, is there any code I could read on the rust side? Seems very interesting

When are y’all gonna support sandboxing? Preferably Docker Sandboxes?

Isolated machines was release recently: https://docs.orbstack.dev/machines/isolated - various recent improvements in the release notes: https://docs.orbstack.dev/release-notes

Nothing specific for Docker yet, but I find the Linux machines are lightweight enough that I just run Docker inside them.

Orbstack plays well with Pycharms BTW.

Amazing software, thanks!

I'd like to see a comparison to https://tart.run/ as well.

AFAICT it's pretty similar.

Tart was just bought by OpenAI so its future is suspect.

I like orbstack in theory, but I find it hard to justify a $96/yr license fee for something that has so many open source, free alternatives. As it is, I’d rather use podman or colima

It's free for personal use, and for a company 96/year is absolutely nothing, I'd hope.

The alternatives are all broken in some ways is the answer, including the official paid docker enterprise.

Personally I’d rather the company provisioned me MacBook hardware with Linux. Unless Fable or some other ai ports asahi properly to modern hardware I expect to retire before this is possible, orbstack is the next best thing, available today.

I really like OrbStack and am also not sure why I'd use Container Machines over it, at the moment...

OrbStack still uses a single big VM, Container Mashines each spawn its own MicroVM. Isolation level on Container Machines is better from that point of view.

Not a full docker env, I aimed this as doing builds though you can run dockerd as an option, https://github.com/cpuguy83/crucible uses the containerization framework to run either build kitd or dockerd and wire it up to docker/buildx cli (or whatever client tooling you want to use).

The Containerization framework is a library that sits as a layer on top of the virtualization framework. So each container is its own VM.

Machine is tooling above the containerization framework to run multiple things in a container in a vm.

I just wish bind mounts would be more performant/native. I get that this is probably impossible, and probably also sucks on Linux, haven't tried.

But like having containers that need file watchers like vite dev server, or frankenphp in watch mode will overload OrbStack real quick since It seems to fallback to polling instead of listening to fs events.

So I'm stuck running vite dev servers and the like on the host.

Can you share more details? OrbStack has always supported inotify/fanotify (Linux fs watching APIs) on bind mounts and most people use watchers with no issues. Happy to look into whatever you're running into: danny@orbstack.dev

I'll remember it and email you when I try it again.

Last time I tried all of orbstack froze and I had to restart my whole mac to fix it. But you also did some recent releases that fix issues related to freezing up, so maybe it was unrelated.

Thanks for the great software! Happy enterprise customer

Thank you for mentioning this, I have been suffering under the yoke of docker.

Orbstack is essentially a happy-path-only contraption that quickly breaks once you happen to take a less visited corner of the street. For example, if you happen to have multiple users who needs to work with it... good luck trying to clean up your system afterwards. So, it's a yoke as well. Maybe a better one for some people, but still a yoke.

Note that orbstack supports audio and usb pass through, which is super nice

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