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It is an option in Lima, I’m not sure if they handle setting up Rosetta yet though:
https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/blob/master/docs/vmtype.md
One more caveat: mounts don't work: https://github.com/abiosoft/colima/issues/503
One of our tools runs in Docker just to ensure that it gets the right version of its dependencies, and that bug is a pretty huge bug for us, for that tool, as it basically broke things.
Still, we use colima; it is a decent workaround for the "Docker on macOS" problem otherwise.
Totally fair! There are definitely still limitations.
Support for "isolated" machines that don't have bind mounts is planned (https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/169). This is actually mostly implemented internally, but I'm not exposing it until a few remaining security gaps are plugged or it would just give a false sense of security.
If you meant binding servers to specific interface IPs, it might be possible one day but it's very challenging to implement as all of the host's IPs need to be assigned to an interface in the guest and managed accordingly. If you meant connecting machines directly to your LAN, it'll be supported eventually but it's low priority due to unavoidable compatibility issues. https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/342
You can use qemu/libvirt/kvm on any Linux host to run macOS pretty easily these days[1]. I run Ventura on unraid with nvidea gpu passthrough and it’s been fairly painless.
You can also run macOS in docker, but it’s ultimately running through qemu/kvm as well[2]
1. https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
2. https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX
How does it compare to https://multipass.run/?
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
You can use VMware Workstation Player and an unlocker like Auto-Unlocker (https://github.com/paolo-projects/auto-unlocker) to enable Mac OS as a guest. It works, but it's very slow because the Mac guest runs without GPU acceleration.
You can use qemu/libvirt/kvm on any Linux host to run macOS pretty easily these days[1]. I run Ventura on unraid with nvidea gpu passthrough and it’s been fairly painless.
You can also run macOS in docker, but it’s ultimately running through qemu/kvm as well[2]
1. https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
2. https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX
As an alternative, here's a really minimalist command-line wrapper to run VMs in the macOS Virtualization.framework: https://github.com/evansm7/vftool
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