[geofft]

Well, kind of. Docker is a product, with official support for Linux containers on Mac (and Windows containers on Windows!). Docker for Mac comes with a Linux VM as a feature of the product; you don't need to install it yourself inside a VM (though that works, too).

It does sound like adding Rosetta binfmt_misc support would allow Docker for Mac to ship an ARM64 kernel/VM image instead of an amd64 one and benefit from some performance boost, but potentially at the risk of reliability/fidelity. The entire idea of Docker is that the kernel ABI is a (supposedly) stable interface, and even if your userspace changed around it, a Docker container would have its own userspace and wouldn't care. Running a different-architecture kernel and dynamically translating it necessarily means that there will be visible differences in the kernel ABI. Sure, you can translate those differences, but that gets you farther from the promise.