xnu-qemu-arm64 VS xhyve

Probably this fork[1] could be a good starting point.

[1] https://github.com/alephsecurity/xnu-qemu-arm64

iOS on QEMU\ (0 comments)

You are far more likely for one of the iToys emulators to finally come to light

This is due to the way Windows and OSX implement docker. They both use a VM running Linux; Windows uses Hyper-V and OSX uses Bhyve. (https://github.com/machyve/xhyve)

Nowadays, docker uses runc, that is OCI compliant. Docker on macOS uses Hypervisor.framework through xhyve, and is completely macOS native. No VM is used (even under the hood) when running docker on macOS, it's native.

I was happiest with xhyve https://github.com/machyve/xhyve

Serial console in terminal was nice (for me!), network configuration was trash (I think I was able to set the subnet by fiddling around with system plists? and it would revert from time to time), and I didn't have to deal with Virtualbox. I've been away from macs for a while, I don't know if xhyve works on the M1, but it might. I ran a FreeBSD vm so I could run my server code on my laptop in an environment that was like production but slower.

The xhyve fork/port of bhyve for MacOS is worth mentioning: https://github.com/machyve/xhyve

Docker for Mac actually spins up TinyCoreLinux VMs using xhyve that your docker containers run on top of. This is because containers borrow the host kernel, so you can't natively run Linux containers on Mac. Xhyve spawns VMs so a Linux kernel will be present.

There's also been a port of FreeBSD's bhyve to macOS for years: https://github.com/machyve/xhyve (which, in turn, is [or at one point was] used by Docker to virtualize Linux)

I've used xyhve on my Mac to have a FreeBSD VM running a copy of https://www.freshports.org/, including a copy of the database, which runs about 200GB. For dev work, it was fine. I used it when I didn't have [great] internet connectivity, for example, when on the train/plane. When upgrading packages or just doing dev work, it was great.