A hypervisor is not exactly a container. Definitely not in the Linux sense. It may be more secure, but it is also slower.

Further, there's no decent solution for shipping a macOS container image to run in a VM. Linux, yes, Mac, no.

Finally, good luck getting your virtualized macOS app to interact reasonably with your main OS (no drag and drop, no OpenGL, etc.).

I would rather chroot.

How much slower?

Not much slower than, say, Hyper-V or Virtualbox or other hypervisors that live alongside a general purpose desktop OS. Remember, they're using the same Intel chips and VT-d and such as anything else; as long as you have enough CPU power it's going to run fine.

IIRC the Docker implementation for OS X runs a tiny, carefully-configured Linux VM transparently in the background. This isn't that dissimilar from the Windows Subsystem for Linux from a user standpoint.

I've done plenty of Docker work on OS X; the only real weirdness is that you're running Linux in the containers and OS X outside. Eventually, though, before switching completely to a native Linux desktop, I moved deeper into the containers and would barely ever see the OS X command prompt any more.

Our build time on Linux container is 8 minutes, but it's a few hours on macOS using docker containers. I haven't dug into it but the hypervisor seems to be single threading the normally multicore compile.

Primarily disk access is a lot slower, even with Hyper-V. Eg. Compilation suffers from this. But tasks that don't use the disk too much shouldn't be that bad.

Measurably slower than a LXC container, but still much faster than a full VM.

Qemu has a backend too if I'm not mistaken?

In other words, nothing serious.

Does anyone actually use Docker on Mac?

Xhyve is more of a proof-of-concept than a production-ready tool.

> Does anyone actually use Docker on Mac?

What? We use it at work every day for local development, and my previous employer did as well. It has issues, definitely, but they have more to do with Docker than with xhyve.

But doesn’t Docker on Mac run a Linux VM? I don’t think it uses any of MacOS’s isolation features.

It uses Hyperkit: https://github.com/moby/hyperkit

> Does anyone actually use Docker on Mac?

I use it extensively. It is a desktop product however; it you aren't expected to put a swarm of MacBook pros into production.

Unless you want to run CD to the App Store? So fun....

Ah, but if the XServe had not died and datacenters had racks of these things, there'd no doubt be a production quality implementation by now. Shame.

Xhyve is but one of the options for fronting hypervisor.framework.

Calling it “not serious” is quite wrong.

I use Docker on Mac, and know many others who do as well.

I personally know of at least 3 or 4 engineering teams of 30+ developers who use it daily.

>Does anyone actually use Docker on Mac?

Sure, for development tasks.