vftool VS rd

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

So, please please solve this request here: https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop/issues/18...

https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop/releases

Then in Rancher Desktop you enable WSL integration as shown here:

If using rancher desktop: https://docs.rancherdesktop.io/tutorials/working-with-images/ https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop/issues/952

> docker desktop is pretty dead now that it's got restrictive licensing etc...

It would probably be nice to hear more about why you think this is! I've certainly heard of some having to move away from Docker Desktop.

However, at the scale where you need a license (250 employees or 10 million $ in annual revenue) it's not quite as big of an issue, especially at their current pricing per seat: https://www.docker.com/pricing/

> stick to standard open source tools like Colima etc...

Sticking to open source is a great idea!

I think mentioning that Colima runs on macOS and Linux only at the moment is also a good idea: https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

A large market share of the Docker Desktop installs are Windows in particular (since it's "the one way" how most install Docker nowadays, as opposed to not really needing a GUI or the supporting tools on Linux).

In another comment I mentioned Podman Desktop as a mostly viable alternative: https://github.com/containers/podman-desktop

Then there's also Rancher Desktop as well: https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop

Regardless, it's nice to see reputable orgs behind the open source projects as well, which gives a bit more credence to their chances of surviving for the years to come.

Great, then can you speak to whether rancher-desktop supports the "--platform" argument to "run" the same way that finch does?

I wouldn't mind answering it myself, but it looks like rancher-desktop is an electron something or other: https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop/blob/v1.6... and even downloading the 500MB release zip shows that there's `Rancher Desktop.app/Contents/Resources/resources/darwin/lima/bin/limactl` hidden in it, but I'm a distrustful sort and I don't want to crawl through unlimited lines of typescript to find out what this is going to do to my system

Maybe it's just that I'm not the right audience for this, since I am the polar opposite of "some gui fanciness," as I came up through the docker-machine universe, and now colima, and thus have a lot more comfort debugging CLI tooling when something inevitably goes toes up