I did an experiment migrating my Podman workload to Apple's container @ https://gist.github.com/jmonster/39e14585e107dbf990a90966c0f...
TL;DR reduces ram/storage usage; minimizes it's existence
> Memory defaults to half of host memory
That's the most expensive part of the whole transaction, b/c AFAIK, RAM is then dedicated to the VM. It can be swapped out, I suppose, but that's not great.
Apple has never been about supporting legacy platforms with new features. And with over a quarter of revenue and two fifths of Apple's gross profits coming from services, one could argue the incentives run either way.
Our biggest perf/resource gain is dynamic memory, which reduces memory usage a lot by releasing unused memory back to macOS. Nothing else supports this, including Containerization.
I gave Container Machines a try and it seems to be much closer to OCI containers with a default bind mount than OrbStack machines. It has fewer integrations and doesn't run systemd or any other normal init system, so it's hard to run services.
If the guest image has /sbin/init, we use that.
We'd recommend using a base image for the guest that includes systemd. ie: https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/container-...
"Real Linux services for testing. Run a database or whatever your stack needs as a system service — systemctl start postgresql works on images with systemd installed."
Edit: It's a VM per container. https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/technical-...
Discover container machines
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
This is a step in the right direction but requires any given developer’s buy-in first, right?
Blog post soon
* need a usb sdcard reader for macbook pro cause the builtin is not usb)
I'd stick to Colima, or Orbstack if you trust them enough to not do a rug-pull once their users are reliant on them enough to pay any amount.
If they were to support darwin containers, what would be the point? Literally nobody would build to it, Linux won.
because nobody does ci/cd against macOS or iOS apps right?
There aren’t any app developers avoiding the Apple ecosystem because there aren’t Darwin containers. They don’t sell server hardware and by all accounts have no intention of ever reentering that space. So they’d spend a bunch of developer cycles to reduce their own revenue stream with no apparent upside beyond “goodwill” which they’ve never been overly concerned about.
BSD actually has this already.
There's also simply the possibility of using linux software directly in macos without doing OS dependent changes to the software.
Running VMs is really really easy and low maintenance demand on Apple. And it’s guaranteed compatibility.
Wasn’t compatibility what really sunk WSL1?
Yes, but a big part of the problem with WSL1 was the size of the conceptual gap between POSIX and Windows NT that WSL1 had to bridge. An “MSL1” would likely have fewer problems because the gap between macOS and Linux is smaller, given they are both POSIX
The other thing Apple could potentially do, is add Linux-compatible APIs to macOS. IBM wanted to support Kubernetes on their z/OS mainframe operating system, so they implemented on it a clone of Linux namespace APIs, e.g. unshare. Then we could have macOS nodes in a K8S cluster-which might actually be useful for some people, e.g. if you have a Jenkins CI farm, the Linux nodes can run on K8S, but currently macOS nodes (which you need if you are targeting iOS or macOS) can’t, they have to be bare metal or VMs.
More Linux-macOS source compatibility would also benefit macOS by making it less work to port software to it from Linux
It’s the only legal way to do so, due to the software license on MacOS.
I have made it a MCP so that it's easily discoverable by all the coding agents
I am trying it on but its brekaing on homebrew 1.0.0. The formula puts plugins at opt/container/libexec/container-plugins/ and the apiserver looks in libexec/container/plugins/
This can be solved through a symlink or smth
Are you sure about that? A few comments above a commenter states that they don’t run inits at all (because they ran alpine), multiple people replied that it works fine if you give it an image with an init, and they acknowledged their error.
The proton model has the benefit that bugs on linux can be fixed by Valve and the Wine community. While bugs in an official linux port can only be fixed by the game publisher which rarely happened. There also seems to be virtually no downsides to running a Windows game in Proton. These days I don't even bother checking the Wine DB or proton rating because unless the game is deliberately blocking linux via anti cheat, it will just work.
Which for many folks is good enough for what they are doing, thus the status quo of desktop platforms will hardly change for current form factors.
I can create docker-images with docker compose, or use something like colima, which this seems to be close to (that should have some advantages over docker, although my hope of circumventing W^X page protection did not pan out).
I was perplexed that the repository does not put these container machines in context. The seem to be close to colima? When should I use which option (docker, collima, container machines ?)
Maybe others wonder too but are ashamed to ask. I have no shame ;)
Thanks for any pointers
I usually run like a db, redis, maybe something like rabbitmq/zeromq and have a app that uses these services (makefile/docker-compose).
I would love to switch if this in fact is a lightweight replacement.
However, unlike Lima, an Apple Container is not a full VM, so you cannot SSH to it, or forward SSH-agent signatures into a machine.
So it's more of a devcontainer story, which is also a great use case. Nice to see Apple creating tooling around their VZ framework.
Edit: referential clarity.
It's a full vm
UX wise it looks kinda neat though!
There's some clever advertising in it for Linux, if Linux was advertising.
In general I understand the rationale behind Apple's decision. They sell hardware, and there's real demand for macOS on servers to run build jobs and other Mac-only tools. Giving you the ability to run multiple containers on a single Mac would end up turning a 10 Mac Mini order into a 2 Mac Minis order for most people. Rest assured, even if it would be technically possible they'd find a way to cap it somehow via the EULA or whatever
I would really love if apple could give inexpensive way to run amd64 containers for situations when dev wants to use their own hardware. We've used LIMA for now, was too much of a hussle. But if there's a more native experience – would give it another try.
Maybe hold 1 release back, but other than that, I don't think "holding out" on macOS releases has ever been a winning strategy.
In the end, macOS model presupposes users moving to the latest release sooner rather than later.
It looks like Golden Gate fixes this design a lot.
Yes’n’t: https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/technical-...
> container relies on the new features and enhancements present in macOS 26. You can run container on macOS 15, but you will need to be aware of some user experience and functional limitations. There is no plan to address issues found with macOS 15 that cannot be reproduced on macOS 26.
The issues are around networking.
(Plus, you could always even have amd64 linux containers on macOS AS, with good performance, via Rosetta2).
By the way, is it headless or can it run a full Linux desktop? Use case: buy a Mac, uninistall whatever can be uninstalled, run the Linux VM as primary desktop forgetting MacOS and without going through Asahi and the incomplete hardware support.
"bind mounts? I'm better without it"
> container runs containers differently. Using the open source Containerization package, it runs a lightweight VM for each container that you create. This approach has the following properties:
> * Security: Each container has the isolation properties of a full VM, using a minimal set of core utilities and dynamic libraries to reduce resource utilization and attack surface.
> * Privacy: When sharing host data using container, you mount only necessary data into each VM. With a shared VM, you need to mount all data that you may ever want to use into the VM, so that it can be mounted selectively into containers.
> * Performance: Containers created using container require less memory than full VMs, with boot times that are comparable to containers running in a shared VM.
So: you build it as a container image and MacOS starts a VM to run it.
Edit: quite unusually for a container it runs systemd. They give an example "systemctl start postgresql".
I started using Colima a couple of years ago because I got bored of how bad Docker Desktop was and just started using the CLI / the "Services" tool window in whatever Jetbrains IDE I was using at the time anyway. I can't see myself moving away from it any time - having multiple profiles is an absolute winner of a feature for me there, but maybe the next time I set up a Mac from scratch I'll have a play with this.
Doesn’t seem to have Compose support though, but it’s probably not impossible to build upon.
And of course, it also uses VMs, though unlike Docker, it’s one (micro-?) VM per container: https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/technical-...
I guess my use case is not that important for the main user of these tools.
They've now added a WSL-style virtual machine layer, but there's no x86 container story (Apple's killing Rosetta) so I imagine some qemu shimming will be required.
There's still no equivalent to VPNKit or GVisor for networking so you'll be bridging I think. See: https://cacm.acm.org/research/a-decade-of-docker-containers/ for how Docker for Mac does this
I can't spot any support for dynamic memory ballooning to prevent the hypervisor from gobbling up too much memory. We've had this in Xen since forever! https://xenproject.org/blog/ballooning-rebooting-and-the-fea...
And, most obviously: NO SUPPORT FOR MACOS. This is the single feature that only Apple can do, and they're choosing not to implement it deliberately, and it's so stupid given the pains we all have to go through to implement CI for macOS. In the land of OCaml, we were forced to implement a custom ZFS snapshotter to get reasonably cost effective macOS CI for our package repository: https://tarides.com/blog/2023-08-02-obuilder-on-macos/. This was fun to build, but it sucks to have to maintain it.
Also, I'm really curious what the GPU passthrough story here is for LLMs, since the Apple Silicon -> Linux kernel support is gated on Asahi's support, but that's been lagging beyond M2 due to the efforts of reverse engineering.
Do better for your developers, Apple. This is a half-baked sweep across third-party software without addressing the core needs around your own operating system.
I wrote about that angle here: https://igorstechnoclub.com/sandbox-exec/
Feels like the spiritual successor to sandbox-exec, but with VM-level isolation.
(you remote into a system and part of your environment comes with you; that's very Plan9-like.)
LE: nevermind, it is already on MacOS. Did not read everything.
In production though, I've moved completely to systemd isolation of apps, rather than Docker-like containers; essentially blackboxes and present a supply chain threat. There's also a DRY principle here. Verification of a host presents a much smaller surface area.
On MacOS?
That said, colima still has the expensive VM that upthread is mentioning.
The pain of working around Docker Desktop is bad.
The use case is actually the opposite of what you seem to want (i.e. running Linux containers on macOS without a Linux VM); this uses a Linux-based container implementation of macOS to provide a long-lived Linux VM that looks more like a VM itself than a container.
Enterprise ARM servers are still a niche product, and so are the ARM developer machines running Linux or Windows. Until this significantly changes, Apple will have to provide good x86 interop - or lose the developer market entirely.
Forcing people towards Apple silicon is of course an attractive approach when targeting the large portion of the market using their MacBooks as Facebook browsing machines, but (especially with the new MacBook Neo) what's going to happen when a large portion of the market for high-end MBPs disappears because it turned from the default no-brainer into a liability?
I'm very, very skeptical of this analysis. Certainly "entirely" is hyperbole.
Basically: they’ve moved on.
Wow, missed this when reviewing OrbStack. I assumed that you just used Containerization and therefore would have the same limitation.
I wanted to make its VM/machine our default secure agent sandbox, but I couldn’t figure out how to isolate this VM from the host properly. This thread prompted me to find the issue though, and I saw this was recently implemented! https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/169
> I gave Container Machines a try and it seems to be much closer to OCI containers with a default bind mount than OrbStack machines. It has fewer integrations and doesn't run systemd or any other normal init system, so it's hard to run services.
The linked md document says:
> Real Linux services for testing. Run a database or whatever your stack needs as a system service — systemctl start postgresql works on images with systemd installed.
Was that not the case when you used container machines?
Nothing specific for Docker yet, but I find the Linux machines are lightweight enough that I just run Docker inside them.
This post reminded me to buy a license, just done it, worth it for the time saved.
AFAICT it's pretty similar.
The Containerization framework is a library that sits as a layer on top of the virtualization framework. So each container is its own VM.
Machine is tooling above the containerization framework to run multiple things in a container in a vm.
Personally I’d rather the company provisioned me MacBook hardware with Linux. Unless Fable or some other ai ports asahi properly to modern hardware I expect to retire before this is possible, orbstack is the next best thing, available today.
But like having containers that need file watchers like vite dev server, or frankenphp in watch mode will overload OrbStack real quick since It seems to fallback to polling instead of listening to fs events.
So I'm stuck running vite dev servers and the like on the host.
Last time I tried all of orbstack froze and I had to restart my whole mac to fix it. But you also did some recent releases that fix issues related to freezing up, so maybe it was unrelated.
Thanks for the great software! Happy enterprise customer
I never want to deal with that again ;)
[edit] fwiw, Termux on Android is similarly a fun pseudo-environment. It's a nice and helpful toy.
That's handy when you're entering paths in a Cygwin/MSYS Bash shell, but might not help much if you're trying to parse or otherwise work with existing patgh variables composed with backslashes.
Doing retail office deployments of custom code on employee computers is a weird niche, and you find whatever works and hope you can maintain it somehow. Cygwin was awesome though, saved me a ton of time and the client a lot of money for the moment. (The client later stipulated to all future franchisees that they had to buy only Macs, lol)
https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/96ufiz/pro...
I am convinced that if POSIX subsystem was UNIX serious, GNU/Linux would never taken off on PC, and the whole would be divided between SGI, HP-UX, Solaris, Aix and Windows NT.
The reason Linux grew in the 90s was because it was part of the hacker culture. Not because better options didn’t exist.
Kids liked the fact that Linux was a free-for-all, anything-goes, platform. It wasn’t stuffy like Unix and it wasn’t proprietary like Windows.
Then those kids grew up and became decision makers themselves. And we started to see Linux replace FreeBSD and commercial Unixes.
Minix was a toy OS for university teachings.
Coherent was commercial.
Nothing else was there on the PC market.
FreeBSD was also used heavily in the late 90s in ISPs and similar domains.
You still can, and it still works exactly the same way.
if you must use windows, it's because you will compile for windows. so you install MSYS, which is a linux distro-ish compiled native for windows. and do your work.
wsl2 (and this apple thing) is just a meme. if you're working in it, you're better of just installing Linux or ssh'ing to a server.
Many enterprises allow windows only so your way into Linux is via WSL2
Maybe this works out better because Linux is more flexible, while Windows/NT is more "set in its ways" and therefore more difficult to implement Linux on top of... Maybe?
Since git and nodejs are both common in modern development and are expected to work efficiently with huge numbers of files, this was a real bottleneck and it couldn't easily be tackled without threatening backward compatibility.
The thing that I don't like of the WSL2 is that is just a VM, but a VM that is very limited. For example working in the embedded development field I often need to use serial ports or USB devices, a thing that the WSL2 is not capable of doing (unless passing trough USB/IP that has its compatibility issues especially for stuff like debuggers needing precise timing), and that the WSL1 was at least for the serial ports able to do. This is a limitation that doesn't allow me to use the WSL. Same thing with all kind of other software that wants to access peripherals of the machine natively (e.g. a GPU for example, or another PCI card, something that to be fair is not even doable as far as I know with hypervisors on Windows but completely doable with hypervisors running on a Linux OS where trough the IO MMU you can share any PCI device of the host to the VM).
WSL1 was a great idea, bad thing that Microsoft abandoned it for something that is just good for web application development.
Also everyone on FOSS gets it wrong, WSL wasn't a subsystem like classical Windows NT ones.
It was based on Drawbridge research using picoprocesses, a new approach for library OSes.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/wsl/pico-pro...
Everyone in FOSS? How about Microsoft got it wrong, since they actually named it The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)? It wasn't the FOSS community who chose the name for them.
Which kernel is running, and is it hosted in hypervisor.framework, as is done with UTM (when not using the qemu mode)?
How is this different to bind mounts
Depending on your threat model, that's fine, but a lot of people (including me) will say that containers are not a security mechanism.
But macOS requires[1] virtualisation for containers anyway; the security is just a bonus.
[1] at least for a real Linux kernel...
On the other hand, in other scenarios, people trust the security boundaries of their working as expected all the time, no? This is the basis of e.g. Android app isolation (every app runs under its own Linux UID/GID), and true multi-user Unix systems trusting the OS's security boundaries to hold have decades of history.
My suggestion: Don't use the host filesystem from the guest at all. It'll be faster, and better isolated. It's a false convenience.
> - Security: Each container has the isolation properties of a full VM, using a minimal set of core utilities and dynamic libraries to reduce resource utilization and attack surface.
> - Privacy: When sharing host data using container, you mount only necessary data into each VM. With a shared VM, you need to mount all data that you may ever want to use into the VM, so that it can be mounted selectively into containers.
> -Performance: Containers created using container require less memory than full VMs, with boot times that are comparable to containers running in a shared VM.
More details, including technical limitations (they’re looking for bug reports and contributions): “Container: Technical Overview” https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/technical-...
If they're investing resources into it regardless, they might at least try making something that Docker for macOS and co. haven't solved the same exact way already. Something that, due to their almost unhealthy obsession with "system integrity", only they can realistically make. Like native containers.
Which is a ton of ‘em.
Why would any serious developer use closed-source code they can't debug and modify? Especially for a production server?
It's the same reason no serious developers or hackers use macOS, like part of the point of being a developer is being able to dig into the code at any layer and debug and fix things.
Even Microsoft gave up on Windows and just runs Linux most things except niche cases. Heck, even SQL Server which is expensive piece of machinery got ported to Linux and that's the default target now in their docs.
With that said, one can't deny Apple's success on the b2c side of things so it feels wrong to call their strategy a failure.
Which is why so many projects get burned with their license choices.
That being said, my point isn't that Apple should absolutely focus on making a server OS again. It just saddens me how far behind macOS has fallen as they stopped caring about the fundamentals; back in the day, it would be Linux trailing behind macOS. Nowadays, you can't even have multiple routing tables on the latter, the firewall code was probably last updated in Snow Leopard, and what Apple happily shows off on WWDC is a wrapper around Linux. Something functionally equal can be cobbled up together by anyone sufficiently experienced in minutes, using just Bash, OpenSSH, and QEMU.
I really wish macOS would let me have a similar level of control over applications as Linux with namespaces, without me having to do all the heavy lifting.
Apple uses OpenBSD's Packet Filter [1]; I doubt multiple routing tables are a problem. Back in the Snow Leopard days, it was FreeBSD's IPFW, which is also no slouch.
Whatever a firewall can do, PF can do it.
You can also get a nice GUI for PF [2].
> I doubt multiple routing tables are a problem.
The lack of them is a limitation for me (complex VM + VPN setup), which requires me to do pretty unholy static routing and address rewriting with pf.
I think even Apple has come across this; they added "scoped routing" (which IMO is a hacky workaround providing some of the functionality you'd get with multiple routing tables) just before iOS shipped with MMS support. Android, for comparison, uses Linux's routing policies and tables to send and receive MMS.
I know I'm basically taking the bait, but I guess I've not been "seriously" developing stuff for the past decade or two, which is news to me!
It's true that missing ABIs will cause random crashes and problems. However, a lot of apps can run with a minimal set of ABIs.
The target for this isn't GUI stuff.
Maybe that’s not what they intended.
I'm not sure how it'd defeat the point of having their own kernel.
As for cost, possibly, but it would really be a huge boon to macOS for software devs. It's hard for me to believe that Rosetta isn't similarly costly, but it's been done because running x86 software is still very much a necessity for MacOS.
Linux will stay forever a headless operating system great for embedded, server rooms and containers.
We have all limited time on Earth, and eventually Valve won't be around as it used to be, might even be acquired, sold, whatever, then what in regards to Linux gaming?
Now with the Fex project, it might end up that running Windows games on linux on a modern ARM processor could be the best way to game going forward, especially for mobile platforms like the SteamDeck.
Proton is based on Wine which translates Windows instructions to Linux.
Besides there's already Wine for mac.
But I would love to be wrong here.
As long as there are just few "normies" using Linux, it is safe from corporations adding their "security", "safety" etc.
I currently have one systemd infected machine, two devuan machines and two freebsd. Next step is paving the systemd one (it randomly craps out) and probably putting FreeBSD on it, but I’m on the fence. It’s a family member’s machine, and devuan is less change.
Linux games depend on Windows ecosystem as their content source.
By having Linux nicely packaged in containers, they get to keep the 90% combined market share, almost no one bothers to support the market of Linux OEMs selling pre-installed Linux desktops and laptops.
The other "distros" used by consumers are Android, WebOs and going forward Googlebooks as Chromebooks evolution.
Meaning in the end a Pyrrhic victory, when Apple Linux, Microsoft Linux, Google Linux, Asus Linux, LG Linux, is all that the general public cares about, and hence no incentive for IT departments to support Linux laptops.
what? it isn't, it's absolutely a right you surely have. The problem is that
a. Apple forces people to buy Macs to build, notarise and deploy iOS and macOS apps b. Apple refuses to implement jails which is something that every OS, including Windows, has nowadays c. Apple only allows you to have 2 VMs - full, fat, with GUI - on each Mac computer, running at once c. Jails/Containers would allow you to easily deploy multiple jobs, which would allow you to have N jobs in parallel, which would mean you'd need way less Mac Studios/Mini in your local CI
I don’t really understand the hype for Apple’s Containerization, it’s just another container runtime alongside many others. It’s not really any better than OrbStack - in fact it’s worse.
[1] https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Docker_Securi...
But yeah, I guess my use case is not the main use of such tools or their purpose in general. Thanks for the link, I‘ll take a look at it.
This was due to implicitly granting the LLM access to the host docker daemon, which has superuser privileges, not due to a "container breakout". That's arguably a very different scenario, but of course both are worth considering.
> So if you want to use containers for anything but easier development, you need to be much more proficient than the average user already.
I'd disagree. Containers, at least without granting them additional privileges such as CAP_NET_ADMIN and without write-bind-mounting sensitive host directories into the container, offer a reasonable security boundary compared to the counterfactual, despite their bad reputation.
There's much more to it than that if you check out the link above. Misconfiguring a container is the 2026 version of misconfiguring FTP and MYSQL in the 90s. I.e. most users don't even know how they are asking to get rooted.
And I think I would caution Apple to consider the lessons of WSL; having shared access to the filesystem is just the bare minimum. Next is networking (and god is this a rabbit hole with WSL), people will want to access their USB devices, X forwarding, GPU passthrough..
If we wanted access to all interfaces, we'd just run it locally.
We want the container as a closed box, "wasting power doing math", i.e. processing what we actually passed to it.
i'd still use less permissive containers for things i don't feel comfortable installing on the host, e.g. npm.
Also SCO lawsuit was more due to IBM's money than Linux.
Both a different situation than Windows NT being available a decade earlier.
USL v. BSDi is what impacted the BSD side, and it was during that lawsuit before Novell bought USL etc.... that the problems were that allowed Linux to make gains while the net/2 distros were in a waiting game IMHO.
The timing absolutely helped Linux and GNU being packaged as a complete system by the various distros etc..., and common OSS distribution points like Walnut Creek and PHT were very much concerned about USL v. BSDi and in an era when you had to make long distance phone calls to download with a modem, a lack of CDroms etc... absolutely caused a dip in adoption of the BSDs.
By the time the IBM v. SCO lawsuits happened (2003) the UNIX wars were long gone and Linux was already established.
SCO/Interactive/Coherent/etc... and other x86ish UNIXes were quite common in my work in the early 1990s, but the whole unix wars is way to complicated to cover in a single post.
The post .com bubble SCO lawsuits really just didn't matter much, the consolidation that happened in the early 90's that ended the UNIX wars, plus Intel killing most of the commercial unix independent CPUs with Itanium untruths and impossible promises and an inability for the major vendors to adapt to a lower margin model etc... killed those off.
The SCO lawsuits were really just the flailing of a dyeing company which was the end result of WordPerfect buying Novell with Novells money and local Utah politics.
GCC was the real catalyst, With even SUN which had used bundled dev tools as a early selling point was unbundling them and charging more, many x86 UNIXes like SCO didn't even come with a tcp/ip stack without an extra fee...and you couldn't take C code from HP to another system and actually have it compile.
As Solaris is really just a sysV-ification of the bsdish sunOs...the introduction of posix as a least common denominator, and Linux being closer to the commercial-ish unixes it was just an easier sell for a lot of users.
In hindsight it may seem silly, but in may projects I was involved with, linux using sysV /etc/init.d/, vs BSD's /etc/rc.conf was the driving factor, because /etc/rc.conf was a shared dependency and harder for us to modularize projects.
IMHO the real Linux advantage is that it was using the gnu user land, and thus gcc worked well with it and companies started to sell commercial support early.
But there were still flavor wars from all sides all the time, and being an ex-op on #unix and #unixhelp from the 1990s, I dealt with them all.
But BSD and heck even ITS etc... was the free-for-all, anything-goes, platform of record.
Those days I was working on a rework of the TRO PLATO learning system which was a real beast but essential for the individual learning project of a charter school i was supporting.
PLATO had been taken from it's dedicated mainframe world and made 'runnable' on W95 workstations with an NT server - but it really didn't run well, and the kids could really get behind the interface into regular Windows environment too readily. In combination the workstations were crazy hard to keep running cleanly.
So in the end; we had to take the software out of Windows, wash it clean in the waters of Silicon Graphics System-V with BSD extensions (X11) Unix and BSD - NeXTSTEP, just so we could bring it back to Windows properly using LiteStep.
Life happened and I lost touch with the outcome of it all, moving on to my next project; but, I kept a LiteSTEP desktop until moving entirely over to Linux in 2004.
Haven't used Windows for anything but a gaming load since '05 and stopped doing even that in about 2010, nothing later than XP.
Over time this would tie the Windows kernel’s requirements so that they matched the Linux kernel’s due to expectations from WSL1 users. This of course is a bad idea for any engineering organization - you will have requirements imposed on you that don’t mesh well with your other non-WSL users and you also have no real sway over Linux governance. This would lead to the Windows kernel either becoming a clone of Linux or serving at least one set of users poorly.
NTFS does not have performance problems. The difference between DevDrive, which uses ReFS (arguably a more 'resilient' file system than NTFS due to journaling) and a standard NTFS volume is the file system filters are either removed or in the case of Defender, put in async mode.
The file system filter architecture is the performance problem, not the file systems. It's a trade off to have a more extensible I/O stack.
I also don't remember why they couldn't just bypass the filter stack for paths in a certain volume - WSL2-like I/O on WSL1 - but there must have been a reason.
"Exploring Darwin and PureDarwin: The Open-Source Foundation of Apple's Operating Systems" - https://machaddr.substack.com/p/exploring-darwin-and-puredar...
m463•16h ago
you can now run linux containers on your mac
... but it could be better.
what about (totally contrived):
webXL•16h ago
m463•16h ago
trollbridge•16h ago
jadar•16h ago
windowliker•16h ago
m463•14h ago
I'm saying the older version of macos could build/run INSIDE the container
just like on a ubuntu 24.04 system you can do:
or and though I haven't tried it, I believe docker can do arm in x86 using an emulator (like rosetta)MBCook•13h ago
So it seems like in theory that should be doable if someone just made the container images right?
windowliker•7h ago
egorfine•6h ago
Yeah I was working on that, created a prototype. I don't see a business in it, so abandoned.