containerization

> Maybe the new "containers" stuff in macOS 26 is going to be a good replacement for that? It is not. The Containerization framework [1] is, in its own words, "a Swift package for running Linux containers on macOS" - it's more or less an Apple-branded Docker runtime. It's not applicable to macOS software. [1]: https://github.com/apple/containerization

If you search the code, they support Rosetta, which means an ARM Linux kernel running x86 container userspace with Rosetta translation. Linux kernel can be told to use a helper to translate code using non-native architecture. Actually, they explain it in detail here: https://github.com/apple/containerization/issues/70#issuecom... It's unclear whether this will keep being supported in macOS 28+, though: https://github.com/apple/container/issues/76, https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1l7maqp/comment/...

Hard same. I wonder if this does anything different to the existing projects that would mean one could use the WSL2 approach where containerd is running in the Linux micro-VM. A key component is the RPC framework - seems to be how orbstack's `macctl` command does it. I see mention of GRPC, sandboxes and containers in the binfmt_misc handling code, which is promising: https://github.com/apple/containerization/blob/d1a8fae1aff6f...

The submission is about https://github.com/apple/containerization, not https://github.com/apple/container. The former is for apps to ship with container sidecars (and cooler news IMO); the latter is 'I am a developer and I want to `docker run ...`'. (Oh, and container has a submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229239)

They include the kernel config here[0] > Containers achieve sub-second start times using an optimized Linux kernel configuration[0] and a minimal root filesystem with a lightweight init system. [0]: https://github.com/apple/containerization/blob/main/kernel/c...

The video on Containerization.framework, and the Container tool, is live [0]. It looks like each container will run in its own VM, that will boot into a custom, lightweight init called vminitd that is written in Swift. No information on what Linux kernel they're using, or whether these VMs are going to be ARM only or also Intel, but I haven't really dug in yet [1]. [0] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/346 [1] https://github.com/apple/containerization

:-) It isn't systemd: > Containers achieve sub-second start times using an optimized Linux kernel config, minroot filesystem, and a lightweight init system, vminitd https://github.com/apple/containerization/blob/main/vminitd

The framework that container uses is built in Swift and also open sourced today, along with the CLI tool itself: https://github.com/apple/containerization

Seems to be this: https://github.com/apple/containerization

FWIW, here are the repos for the CLI tool [1] and backend [2]. Looks like it is indeed VM-based container support (as opposed to WSLv1-style syscall translation or whatever): Containerization provides APIs to: [...] - Create an optimized Linux kernel for fast boot times. - Spawn lightweight virtual machines. - Manage the runtime environment of virtual machines. [1] https://github.com/apple/container [2] https://github.com/apple/containerization

Container runs OCI (docker) compatible by creating lightweight VMs. This repository houses the command-line interface which is powered by containerization[0], the Swift framework wrapping Virtualization.framework to implement an OCI runtime. [0]: https://github.com/apple/containerization