[Question]: Will this work for running containerised macos, from inside macos? (asking mainly due to KVM support)

[acecilia]

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Hi 👋

Thanks for this, looking very promising 🔥

I would like to ask about the usecase of running a containerised macos, from inside macos.

• Why would I like to do this? To be able to launch a consistent well-known machine state every time I need. Without containers, running multiple tasks on an agent can have the side-effect of altering the machine global state, which can end up impacting the execution of the tasks. Simple example: if you have 2 tasks that install brew, the first one will succeed while the second one will fail (because the first task already installed brew)
• When looking into this idea high level, I anticipate two potential issues:
  • The well known performance degradation when running docker in macos
  • The lack of support for KVM in macos that is mentioned in the readme

Based on above I have couple of questions:

• Would you maybe be able to share some general context about wether this project has some history of running macos from macos, or otherwise the main usecase has been running macos from linux?
  • If the main usecase on your side has been running macos from linux, could you maybe share some numbers about how macos performs when running docker-macos-on-non-apple-silicon-linux VS native-macos-on-apple-silicon-macos? I am concerned about the potential performance drop of running macos on non-apple-silicon
• In order to run containerised macos from inside macos, how much of a blocker is the lack of KVM support mentioned in the readme?

Thanks! 🙌

[kroese]

The usecase is running macOS on Linux, and NOT to run macOS on macOS (there are much better solutions for that).

The container is just more of a proof-of-case and playground, and should not be used for anything serious that requires heavy performance. I have no numbers to share, but feel free to run some benchmarks yourself. Also you must not compare performance to running on Apple Silicon, because this is the x64/Intel version of macOS. So compare running the container on a Intel CPU to a real Intel-based Mac and there will maybe will be 5-10 percent performance loss, maybe even less?. But since there is no GPU acceleration their will be a very noticeable loss in the graphics department, much bigger than on the CPU-side.