macOS Container Machines

m463

looks like apple wrote a native docker in swift you can now run linux containers on your mac ... but it could be better. what about (totally contrived): FROM apple/macos:10.11.6 RUN xcodebuild -project myapp.xcodeproj -scheme MyScheme -configuration Release

jaimehrubiks

Will this be able to replace docker desktop an equivalents, removing the expensive Linux VM that runs alongside them?

namegulf

Would be nice if they also support Intel based macs, what prevents?

blahgeek

OrbStack works really well for me. I wonder how it’s compared to this performance wise

timsneath

To clarify a few comments here: this is not only OCI containers: container machines add support for persistence and filesystem mounting, making container machines a great lightweight Linux environment for developers using macOS. More details here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/389

a1o

With colima I can run AMD64 (x86) Linux containers in my Arm64 too. I think this is strictly for Arm64 Linux VMs, or is there some way to run x86 with this too?

WatchDog

Do these containers share a common kernel? Or are they each ran in a separate VM? Edit: It's a VM per container. https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/technical-...

ChrisArchitect

WWDC presentation video: Discover container machines https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/389/

llimllib

Is this new? I thought we had this already In my testing (iirc) filesystem performance was not good enough to be usable with node/rust dev where lots of small files get stat-ed update: what's new is the `container machine` subcommand. I went to test it out, but container failed to run at all for me: https://github.com/apple/container/issues/1681

Barbing

I found it hard to believe I didn’t have a simple way of staying safe by installing an arbitrary application in a sandbox on macOS. (Restoring using Time Machine doesn’t count! :) ) This is a step in the right direction but requires any given developer’s buy-in first, right?

commandersaki

Would be cool if you can redirect USB devices to the VM.

numbsafari

Wouldn’t it be nice if services like Codespaces or Coder or Gitlab would allow you to target running on their hosted/integrated platform, or let you launch that same container completely locally? Sometimes I wanna take my “remote” dev environment off-line but still benefit from the integrated UX.

sachinjoseph

WSL-like implementation on macOS?

riffic

darwin containers when?

osigurdson

I'm surprised they cared enough to do this. I'd still rather use Linux but MacBook value is incredible.

0xbadcafebee

Anyone know why you would use this instead of QEMU+Lima+Colima+Docker/containerd? The latter works on multiple OSes, has a very large ecosystem of tools, images, documentation, and lets you replace pieces as needed

m132

Every time I see Apple flaunting Linux containers I can hardly consider it as anything but admitting defeat. It could easily be Darwin, if they still had the capacity.

t1234s

Is this similar to what cygwin was for windows? Could this be an alternative to homebrew?

cogman10

Is there any reason why macOS doesn't try a WSL1 style approach? I get why that didn't fully work out for windows, but it seems like macOS being another *nix would make a lot of what was hard for windows, easy for mac. It seems like it should be possible to run most linux applications natively on macOS with few additional new APIs. BSD actually has this already.

jwlake

haven't we had hypervisor.framework for like years now?