About the Rosetta Translation Environment

Re:About the Rosetta Translation Environment by cpuguy83 on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @10:35AM (#23614407)

Apple mentioned they are specifically "working with Docker to support 'these things' in coming months". Confirmed with some Docker folks they are working on "something". All very nondescript, but they said they can't talk about it yet.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:About the Rosetta Translation Environment by numpad0 on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @11:36AM (#23615333)

So I had to look this up: Docker do not rely on VT-x. If kernel has cgroups it runs.

Hypothetically it could run natively on Windows NT, Linux, Darwin, Solaris, etc if it ported for appropriate APIs. However, most Docker containers contain x86_64 Linux binaries, so the runtime environment has to be binary compatible with x86_64 Linux.

Thus, instead of going through the pain similar to WSL1, Docker people just spin up a midsize Linux VM, run remote controlled Docker daemon in it and call that as the "Docker for [PLATFORM]". This will suffice because use case of Docker is to debug on a laptop and deploy to GNU/Linux servers.

So if ARM macOS runs an x86_64 Ubuntu VM it also means Docker runs.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:About the Rosetta Translation Environment by monocasa on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @02:14PM (#23617936)

Docker on mac does rely on virtualizing a full linux kernel, and xnu doesn't have containerization APIs to do anything different.

> So if ARM macOS runs an x86_64 Ubuntu VM it also means Docker runs.

So far we haven't seen anything like that happening. The State of the Union talk yesterday went as far as running a uname -a just to show that it was an aarch64 debian they were running.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:About the Rosetta Translation Environment by lsllc on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @11:04AM (#23614811)

Possibly they'll do something like WSL/WSL2 to provide an ARM based Linux kernel interface and then use Rosetta2 to translate the x64 code in user space to ARM?

Having ARM only containers would be mostly useless (it's technically possible, but I bet there are very few ARM container images around).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:About the Rosetta Translation Environment by dannyw on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @11:25AM (#23615151)

There are heaps and heaps of ARM containers around thanks to the Raspberry Pi.

I've never had a problem running Docker on my Pi, and I don't expect anyone will have a problem running Docker on a Mac given Apple's much much larger developer market share.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:About the Rosetta Translation Environment by cpuguy83 on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @11:21AM (#23615068)

All the base images are multi arch, which I suspect covers the majority of uses in dev envs.

[ Parent | on HN ]