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> OrbStack (https://orbstack.dev), which is a Docker Desktop and WSL alternative
Wait why have I never heard of this? I just tried it out and it seems to work amazingly well.
This is higher-level than the Hypervisor framework; this Virtualization framework providers an entire VM with virtio peripherals including a display.
https://github.com/lima-vm/lima can use Virtualization framework for creating VMs, there is also https://github.com/gyf304/vmcli as a very simple CLI utility for running VMs, though it's not very actively maintained.
This is higher-level than the Hypervisor framework; this Virtualization framework providers an entire VM with virtio peripherals including a display.
https://github.com/lima-vm/lima can use Virtualization framework for creating VMs, there is also https://github.com/gyf304/vmcli as a very simple CLI utility for running VMs, though it's not very actively maintained.
VirtualBuddy is a great open-source project that takes advantage of this framework: https://github.com/insidegui/VirtualBuddy
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.
You download them from Apple. https://mesu.apple.com/assets/macos/com_apple_macOSIPSW/com_... is the canonical updater data source. https://mrmacintosh.com/apple-silicon-m1-full-macos-restore-... is that in HTML form, and there's various tools like https://github.com/munki/macadmin-scripts/blob/main/getmacos... for automating it.
Translating x86 -> arm or vice-versa is always going to be slow. No amount of software will ever overcome that. If you are using arm you really need to embrace it. Running x86 on arm is only a hack - whether it's apple or some random github - it will only ever be a hack. It is one thing to dev on arm and deploy to x86 but expecting x86 to perform remotely close to the same exp on arm isn't something that's going to happen.
Having said that..
If you really want to run x86 images on arm, and while we're definitely not 1:1 with docker (and don't want to be) we're interested in people's experiences with https://ops.city as there is native hardware accelerated arm support and x86 on arm. (I'm with the company behind it.) It's definitely going to be more performant than a docker image since docker/k8s not only rely on a full blown linux but also abuse iptables, et al. It also has support for bridging (outside of the vm) and 9pfs so that would help alleviate your pain.
Right. I forked it [0] myself and added direct Rosetta support which was trivial to do according to the Apple documentation. I just had to convert Swift example code to Obj-C.
Have had a PR open for several months with no attention from the author. I almost forgot about it until seeing this HN headline.
[0] https://github.com/JamesDunne/vftool-rosetta