macpine VS vftool

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...

As an alternative, here's a really minimalist command-line wrapper to run VMs in the macOS Virtualization.framework: https://github.com/evansm7/vftool

Does vftool use https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization or https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor ?

https://github.com/evansm7/vftool appears to indicate the former, but I thought the later was required for rosetta so interested to try this.

The battery life on the MacBook M1 is pretty amazing but not having Virtualbox has been a pain and we are exploring options for our new team. I have mostly worked for companies with actual teams dedicated to providing build tools.

Past attempts to Dockerize all the infrastructure dependencies (e.g. we run our own database and DNS servers) and tying all of that with the build scripts was deemed more effort than its worth so that never quite got going. Maybe its different scratch?

I have tried a bunch of these projects so while interesting I'm not sure about building workflows around them:

https://mac.getutm.app/

https://github.com/KhaosT/SimpleVM

https://github.com/danielrfry/toyvm

https://github.com/evansm7/vftool

https://multipass.run/install

https://github.com/features/codespaces

https://medium.com/@paulrobu/how-to-run-ubuntu-22-04-vms-on-apple-m1-arm-based-systems-for-free-c8283fb38309

I know architecture differences will cause pain, hell here we are already. I think everyone will benefit from crowd sourcing experiences and hopefully we can save each other chunks of life thrown away.

==

    What tool do you use to {edit code, build artifacts, run unit tests, deploy artifacts, run e2e tests}

VMs work. Qemu is working with patches. You have to build it though. None of the releases seems to be patched yet. There is an early preview of Parallels. Both Linux and Windows on Arm are working. Docker has an early release as well. There are few prebuilt projects on Github too:

https://github.com/evansm7/vftool

I needed to add a persistent network configuration (which I didn't really figure out -- I was okay with starting an interface manually. I also had to re-generate the SSH host keys for some reason.

In order to do these, I loaded the image in initramfs (basically started the VM w/o specifying root=/dev/vda as the command line argument). Then I mounted /dev/vda and chroot'd to it. Then I could change the root password to something that I knew, and setup the keys / config.

I also was able to use the Ubuntu kernel/initrd to load a Debian 10 image as well. The default Debian 10 cloud image doesn't include the necessary kernel modules (virtio_console might be the only one necessary to add).

I've spent a few days testing out this and the linked vftool (https://github.com/evansm7/vftool) to try to get a Debian VM. It's not an easy thing, but it did eventually work. I ended up corrupting the disk image though, so that wasn't fun.

In order to do this on my Mac w/o needing a Linux machine, I installed ext4fuse so that I could mount raw disk images and mount partitions. I followed instructions from this GH issue, which was a great help.

https://github.com/evansm7/vftool/issues/2

Late to the party here, but I have an M1 MacBook Air--other commenters mentioned marcan's WIP linux port which if fully realized, I'd expect someone would come up with a way to boot arch on it. Today, Apple provides a couple different APIs for accelerated aarch64 virtualization, and I've gotten several distros working using this tool (which uses the Virtualization.Framework). It's FAST too--haven't run benchmarks or anything but compiling code seems as snappy as my i9-9900k desktop

I'm having the exact same problem. 192.168.64.0/24 seems to be the address space that macOS's virtualization framework uses. (At least, vftool spins up VMs using the same space.)

Heres the best guide so far, includes image download links and such: https://github.com/evansm7/vftool/issues/2#issuecomment-735455161