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by pmontra 6 days ago
How is this different from Virtualbox or similar products with a shared folder with the host machine? I expected that existing virtualization tech for Macs already did that. Maybe the improvement is having nothing to configure.

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.
1 comments
iririririr 6 days ago
it differs by lacking all the cool options that makes vmware and virtualbox good products, but apple users will praise it as a benefit

"bind mounts? I'm better without it"

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coldtea 6 days ago
Funny how confidently people can mock while knowing nothing about the specific tech discussed and the different targets. I'd google: VirtualBox vs containers.
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pmontra 6 days ago
It's called a container machine but it's a virtual machine. I quote from https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/technical-...

> 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".

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coldtea 5 days ago
Obviously you still run a virtual machine to provide the Linux part.

But it's a tiny one, tightly integrated with macOS hypervisor, and the interface is standard OCI-compatible containers/images. It's not Virtualbox style VM.

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