macpine VS hyperkit

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...

The author uses a Mac and uses Docker Desktop or colima x Docker CLI to realize a Docker development environment. Dcoker Desktop uses an internal HyperKit (macOS hypervisor) to launch a Linux VM and run dockerd in it. Docker Desktop is based on Lima, and it generates Lima configuration files, and it is used to run Linux.

Sorry, I was misinformed. It seems MacOS still does use a tool called hyperkit to run a (presumably linux) VM as a backend for docker. I thought it was using something similar to jails.

You might try using HyperKit as the hypervisor with Kubernetes. It uses Apple's own hypervisor. Minikube, or rather docker, supports it. I would go with minicube as you can start and stop it as needed with ease.

I've been reading many forum posts: moby/hyperkit#149 docker/for-mac#900

What’s the magic behind docker working on macOS?. The answer is virtualization accomplished by the moby/hyperkit hypervisor (AFAIK), a toolkit for embedding hypervisor capabilities in your application, which means that dockerd works in a VM virtualized by the hyperkit. Why I’m telling you this is once you decide to work with containerd on your macOS environment to discover capabilities and more adapt to it because we assume you use containerd in your Kubernetes environment as a default container runtime, you had to have the same virtualization technology under the hood to let containerd working on macOS. Also, you need to have some client tooling to interact with containerd by keeping simplicity and usability in mind.

Docker on Mac is based on Hyperkit which is a lightweight VM. https://github.com/moby/hyperkit Crostini is running in a full KVM instance. You challenged me about the Termina shell. Type it in and see if I'm right. No need to debate this anymore when you can verify for yourself.

Docker Desktop doesn't use virtualbox behind the scenes. It uses hyperkit.