We Rebuilt the Linux MicroVM Stack on Apple Silicon

Re:We Rebuilt the Linux MicroVM Stack on Apple Silicon by bittermandel on Friday August 21, 2026 @05:14AM (#49385657)

By experience, getting Firecracker to run well on M-series macs is quite the undertaking. I'm not at all surprised Encore decided to take this path considering their customer base!

At Lovable we decided to spend ~1 engineering month getting our sandbox infrastructure to be 100% runnable on Mac and on Linux with predictable builds using Bazel etc.

But we actively decided to take a different route than Encore and run nested virtualization, which on macOS means vfkit -> QEMU -> Kind + Firecracker vm(s). It's been invaluable to get the same development and testing tools on both platforms tbh.

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Re:We Rebuilt the Linux MicroVM Stack on Apple Silicon by drunkonvinyl on Friday August 21, 2026 @07:26AM (#49386513)

I’d like to learn more about doing this myself - do you recommend any good guides or posts?

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Re:We Rebuilt the Linux MicroVM Stack on Apple Silicon by bittermandel on Friday August 21, 2026 @08:33AM (#49387153)

I should do a write-up! Maybe you'll see it posted here soon. We could basically find nothing online...

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Re:We Rebuilt the Linux MicroVM Stack on Apple Silicon by srcreigh on Friday August 21, 2026 @07:37AM (#49386599)

Note M1 and M2 macs don’t have hardware support for nested virt.

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