lima VS macpine

You can run a virtual machine (e.g. lima) from inside a nix-shell, exactly as you would do with a regular shell.

for others similarly curious, here's an example of the thing: https://github.com/noop-inc/template-java-spring-boot/blob/m...

they seem to be using the excellent lima <https://github.com/lima-vm/lima#readme> for booting on macOS; I run colima for its containerd and k8s support but strongly recommend both projects $(brew install lima colima)

Lima is what I use as well. It's quick and easy to just fire up a VM with default settings, but also very easy to configure with different file sharing options, port forwarding, different linux distributions, etc. (their examples are also pretty good IMO [1]).

In particular I use it to run an amd64 VM, which I need to run a stubborn service for work that doesn't run on arm CPUs.

[1] https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/tree/master/examples

Lima (1) is a project that packages Linux distros for MacOS and executes them via qemu in the backend. Maybe you could solve your problem by launching one of their vms and inspecting the command line it generates. You might find an option you were missing.

(1) https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

If you wish to delve into all the configuration possibilities for Lima VM, you can visit this resource.

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

https://lima-vm.io/

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

Github: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

Lima wraps QEMU in a simple CLI, with neat features for container users, such as filesystem sharing and automatic localhost port forwarding, as well as DNS and proxy propagation for enterprise networks. Rancher Desktop wraps Lima with k3s integration and GUI.

Talks: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/blob/master/docs/talks.md

I recommend having a look at [1] which allows you to run lightweight alpine VMs on MacOS with easy port forwarding, file sharing, and you can easily run docker inside of it and use docker context to target it.

[1] https://github.com/beringresearch/macpine

I don't see the point of a dedicated tool for this when it is easy enough just to start a Alpine docker container with a couple commands. As this project is just a wrapper for docker and LXD[1] and those tools are already easy enough for the average SWE to interact with, the project seems to just over-complicate an already existing workflow.

[1] https://github.com/beringresearch/macpine#motivation

It uses almost same mounting tech as colima (9p)

Macpine: https://github.com/beringresearch/macpine/blob/71788e9c3c09c...

colima: https://github.com/abiosoft/colima/blob/7ebcf14a69158afa43b2...

So it seems that it has same performance as colima project as well.

As for IO performance, see this colima issue https://github.com/abiosoft/colima/issues/146#issuecomment-1...