pickleMeTimbers

For MacOS, Macpine has a similar premise: https://github.com/beringresearch/macpine

With a view to use lightweight Linux VMs (alpine) to:

* Easily spin up and manage lightweight Alpine Linux environments.

* Use tiny VMs to take advantage of containerisation technologies, including Incus, LXD and Docker.

* Build and test software on x86_64 and aarch64 systems.

For sure. Interestingly, it looks like Stephane gave his resignation first:

> Following the announcement of my resignation, Canonical decided to pull LXD out of the Linux Containers projects and relocate it to a full in-house project [1].

1. https://stgraber.org/2023/07/10/time-to-move-on/

After a positive reception by the HN community five months ago [1, 2], this small project has reached a 1.0 milestone with:

* Encrypted instance import/export using age file encryption

* Secure credential configurations

* Instance autostart

* Multiple quality-of-life improvements, including instance tagging

The goal of this project is to enable MacOS users to:

* Easily spin up and manage lightweight Alpine Linux environments.

* Use tiny VMs to take advantage of containerisation technologies, including LXD and Docker.

* Build and test software on x86_64 and aarch64 systems.

--- References

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33762657

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33769274

We're using Multipass + Bravetools (https://github.com/bravetools/bravetools) / Docker to build system/application containers.

I believe multipass uses SSHFS (https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/how-to-improve-mounts-perform...) to mount filesystems between the host and the VM. Performance has been excellent.

It's possible to use Apple's virtualisation framework when running native arch VMs in QEMU, for example setting -accel to hfv, seen here: https://github.com/beringresearch/macpine

UTM should also support this.

This is also achieved through:

1) https://github.com/lima-vm/lima 2) https://github.com/beringresearch/macpine

With a nice CLI included.

The biggest challenge was getting multi-arch builds sorted. Ended up putting together a layer on top of QEMU to run both x86-64 and aarch64 VMs (https://github.com/beringresearch/macpine). Have pre-baked VMs with LXD installed inside each instance, with main software builds taking place inside LXD containers - works pretty well so far.

Purely speculation, but introducing a dependency that their competitors may need to rely on could create a new revenue stream through a service-like business model. Community contribution could be invaluable as well, but judging by the repo status, it isn't very popular...yet?