containerd-wasm-shims VS colima

Besides deploying the application locally and deploying to Fermyon Cloud, you can also deploy your Spin application to Kubernetes using the new Containerd integration for Spin.

Yeah, runtimeClass lets you specify which CRI plugin you want based on what you have available. Here's an example from the containerd documentation - you could have one node that can run containers under standard runc, gvisor, kata containers, or WASM. Without runtimeClass, you'd need either some form of custom solution or four differently configured nodes to run those different runtimes. That's how krustlet did it - you'd have kubelet/containerd nodes and krustlet/wasm nodes, and could only run the appropriate workload on each node type.

You can absolutely install the wasm shim without Desktop. (They won't tell you that because Desktop is a revenue stream for Mirantis.)

In your VM or WSL instance that's running Docker, get the shim from here: https://github.com/deislabs/containerd-wasm-shims (You might need to build it yourself)

Then specify the --runtime and --platform arguments like instructed in the doc, but with a slight modification:

--runtime=containerd-wasm-shim=/path/to/containerd/wasm/shim

This works because the container runtime is simply a Go binary, and Go binaries are completely self-contained.

While looking into the issue with Podman, I came across colima. Apart from being able to run AMD64 images out of the box, there were additional benefits to it, one of which was, unlike podman, colima could use Rosetta 2 for x64 emulation (which is significantly more performant).

If you don't need a GUI, the following combo works pretty well:

- https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

- https://github.com/peterldowns/localias

You might look into CoLima as a way to get started.

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima?tab=readme-ov-file

Its user interface is Docker-like, using containers.

For full desktop, I've only used the commercial app "Parallels", which can set up an Ubuntu desktop for you. Also Fedora and Alpine and Debian I believe.

But

> I don't really have any resources to share. I just know how to boot a vmlinuz with an initramfs using QEMU, and decided to download the Linux kernel source code and try compiling it.

I highly recommend working through Linux from Scratch and possibly the Gentoo Handbook. It's a journey.

I could not find any guide how to add WASM container capability to Docker running on Colima. This guide provides a few Colima templates for exactly this, which adds WasmEdge, Wasmtime and Wasmer runtime types.

Colima runs much faster on Macos: https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

After docker desktop became unusable, I jumped to colima and never looked back. I still use the docker runtime in it (the non-proprietary part) but it also supports containerd. On Mac it's just a "brew install colima" and then "colima start"

I also install the compose and ecr credentials plug-ins (since I use ecr for my container registry.) It has the full functionality of docker desktop minus the UI, which I never used anyways.

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

On my M1 Pro system, I have nothing but positive things to say about the experience of using Colima (https://github.com/abiosoft/colima). Quick to set up and fast to use.

I'd say Lima and Colima should be enough for most use cases:

https://lima-vm.io/

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

The bash/zsh equivalent wouldn't be too hard, but I use fish.

[0] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima, https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fabiosof...

[1] https://orbstack.dev [3], https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Forbstack.dev

[2] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima#customizing-the-vm and https://github.com/abiosoft/colima/blob/main/docs/FAQ.md#edi...

[3] I’m on OrbStack now, but it isn’t so much better at how I use Docker than Colima is that I think that it’s an instant buy, especially with the planned subscription model. If I used anything other than the Docker integration, I might think it's better, but as of right now, no.

I also have some issues with its insistence on asking for elevated permissions. I will never grant permission[4] to make a symlink to the "standard" Docker socket; context and `$DOCKER_HOST` work well enough. It should not ask if the permission hasn't been given once. I also worry about other "advanced" features that may need an elevated permissions helper[5].

[4] https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/281#issuecomment...

[5] https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/281#issuecomment... and following