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Can you make containers in Darwin?



Seems like it's not quite what would qualify as a container for many, but a nice effort.

> rund doesn’t offer the usual level of container isolation that is achievable on other OSes due to limited Darwin kernel API.

https://github.com/darwin-containers/rund?tab=readme-ov-file...


Yes, the macOS way, with Virtualization Framework.


The insane stability of the Linux ABI is partially what makes containers useful.

The fact that containers can reliably depend on the ABI contract, thus placing almost any clib they wish they want inside the container is fairly unique.

That extreme stability of that contract is awesome for namespace decoupling. Unfortunately Apple and Microsoft do not have such stable interfaces.

Remember containers are just namespaces.


Only in the context of Linux containers, not in general, starting with HP-UX Vaults on UNIX land.


Virtualization is not containerization. Linux has namespaces, BSD has jails, and even Windows has Windows containers (thought doubt anyone actually uses them). If that's the MacOS way, then the MacOS way must be incompetence.


Besides the way Apple puts a hard limit on the number of those you can spin up, don't they also virtualize hardware and run their own kernels? That's just not the kind of virtualization that containers are.


The virtualization layer breaks many "container" expectations, I wouldn't call this containers without big caveats. Same as firecracker VMs may give some of the ergonomics of containers but come with a lot of limitations.


(No.)




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