Linux VMs

[robertwbl]

A very interesting project! As far as I understand, this is equivalent to KubeVirt but using the apple Virtualization API instead of QEMU/KVM, and targeting only macOS VMs. Is that correct?

Just today, Apple announced that they're bringing support for Linux guests to their Virtualization API (and also some kind of Rosetta 2 passthrough to allow running x86 binaries within ARM Linux guests). Do you see a future where this project may be enhanced to support this new functionality? I can imagine some very exciting possibilities if so.

[Raikerian]

Hey,

Creating Linux VMs via Virtualization.framework has actually been possible for quite a while—even before macOS virtualization officially appeared on Intel Macs.

To directly answer your question: yes, it’s entirely feasible to support Linux guests (or any other functionality offered by Virtualization.framework) in this project. The main consideration is the use case. Currently, macOS-vz-kubelet was designed to bring macOS workloads to Kubernetes, and we already support a Docker sidecar for running containers in parallel. In theory, using Linux VMs could replace Docker, but that would require us to manage an OCI-compliant image format for those VMs. And if you’re talking about running standalone VMs, you might ask why not simply run them on non-Apple nodes in Kubernetes, which would be more cost-effective and efficient than using Apple ARM host.

What kind of use case do you have in mind?