macOS Container Machines

To clarify a few comments here: this is not only OCI containers: container machines add support for persistence and filesystem mounting, making container machines a great lightweight Linux environment for developers using macOS. More details here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/389

I belong to a rare breed of very opportunistic hobby-developers that like to use MacOS but also like to use linux machines or BSDs (rpi etc) sometimes.

I can create docker-images with docker compose, or use something like colima, which this seems to be close to (that should have some advantages over docker, although my hope of circumventing W^X page protection did not pan out).

I was perplexed that the repository does not put these container machines in context. The seem to be close to colima? When should I use which option (docker, collima, container machines ?)

Maybe others wonder too but are ashamed to ask. I have no shame ;)

Thanks for any pointers

This is all fine and dandy, but where are the native Darwin Jails Apple? Still scared that people will filling whole rooms of Mac Minis if you allow them to have multiple macOS containers and not only up to two fat VMs per machine?

Michael Crosby wrote this! He's a long-time maintainer of Docker, Containerd, and more! He was Docker's first to receive the 'Distinguished Engineer' Title. This means a lot coming from him.

OrbStack works really well for me. I wonder how it’s compared to this performance wise

I don‘t understand why these tools always advertise about mounting the $HOME inside the container. Isn‘t it better to have a complete isolation? Isn‘t that the point of using such a thing?

Do these containers share a common kernel? Or are they each ran in a separate VM?

Edit: It's a VM per container. https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/technical-...

Interesting from a Docker perspective, but I’m more interested in it as a sandbox for AI agents and untrusted code execution.

I wrote about that angle here: https://igorstechnoclub.com/sandbox-exec/

Feels like the spiritual successor to sandbox-exec, but with VM-level isolation.

This is awesome! I just added this as a backend for yoloAI on Mac, and wow... super fast startup times now!

Will this be able to replace docker desktop an equivalents, removing the expensive Linux VM that runs alongside them?

So essentially both macOS and Windows now heavily support developing using Linux on them. They can't more openly admit that they are no match for Linux in that area.

There's some clever advertising in it for Linux, if Linux was advertising.

Anyone know why you would use this instead of QEMU+Lima+Colima+Docker/containerd? The latter works on multiple OSes, has a very large ecosystem of tools, images, documentation, and lets you replace pieces as needed

Apple containers are great for providing a sandbox to your AI coding agents

I have made it a MCP so that it's easily discoverable by all the coding agents

https://github.com/instavm/coderunner

It's funny that the system config page (https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/container-...) lists pebibytes for RAM configurations... in this day and age where buying a 16GB stick for workstation would cause me to eat instant ramen for a couple of months because my dentist needs an LLM chatbot on their page to stay competitive!

UX wise it looks kinda neat though!

I still can’t use Containers because of a broken DNS implementation. I suppose I could manually set the DNS as I switch on and off VPN, but I don’t have to with Finch, Podman, or Docker Desktop.

How would I replace docker compose containing multiple services that communicate with each other with this? Seems cool for an individual service.

Is this new? I thought we had this already

In my testing (iirc) filesystem performance was not good enough to be usable with node/rust dev where lots of small files get stat-ed

update: what's new is the `container machine` subcommand. I went to test it out, but container failed to run at all for me: https://github.com/apple/container/issues/1681

Just to clarify, this requires Mac OS 26 Tahoe for "container" doesn't it? So those of us holding out on Sequoia who can't stand the broken glass UI or what's called and the other undesired features need to stick to Docker desktop.

The costs are startup time and image compatibility: dockerhub images don't work as machine images because container machine expects systemd

I am trying it on but its brekaing on homebrew 1.0.0. The formula puts plugins at opt/container/libexec/container-plugins/ and the apiserver looks in libexec/container/plugins/

This can be solved through a symlink or smth

They shouldn't bury the details about how the containerization actually works.

This appears to be an LXC-style alternative for macOS; however, unlike native LXC on Linux, this tool relies on VMs. While Docker and Podman also utilize a VM on macOS, they offer the advantage of the Docker Compose format. In my view, the ability to use YAML for declarative configuration is the most critical feature for any container tool. I have nothing against CLI tools in general, but I prefer avoiding repetitive manual commands that could be easily automated via Docker Compose or Kubernetes manifests.

Is there any reason why macOS doesn't try a WSL1 style approach? I get why that didn't fully work out for windows, but it seems like macOS being another *nix would make a lot of what was hard for windows, easy for mac. It seems like it should be possible to run most linux applications natively on macOS with few additional new APIs.

BSD actually has this already.

So are there any benchmarks that compare all containers / docker / Lima / Colima / virtual box / VMware / orbstack and others ?

I've looked into replacing Lima with Apple Containers for https://runmachine.dev.

However, unlike Lima, an Apple Container is not a full VM, so you cannot SSH to it, or forward SSH-agent signatures into a machine.

So it's more of a devcontainer story, which is also a great use case. Nice to see Apple creating tooling around their VZ framework.

Edit: referential clarity.

I'm surprised they cared enough to do this. I'd still rather use Linux but MacBook value is incredible.

Handy for sure!

In production though, I've moved completely to systemd isolation of apps, rather than Docker-like containers; essentially blackboxes and present a supply chain threat. There's also a DRY principle here. Verification of a host presents a much smaller surface area.

In the intro it mentions automatically mapping user and home dir. So host files accessible the container. Any settings to control this?

Python binary wheels now have to be built for aarch64 for them to work inside the container, unless they are built using the corresponding build system while installing. It is not common for python binary libs to publish arm64 binary wheels, as most often they target amd64.

We have WSL at home.

Most of my team's development happens on beefy desktop machine in incus containers per dev+project (so you run yourname-projname-dev). It has its own tailscale inside so you can open it like regular https website or give to another dev to check out – no need to deploy your branch somewhere, just run it. New dev onboard takes 10 minutes from zero to dev env with VSCode remote development.

I would really love if apple could give inexpensive way to run amd64 containers for situations when dev wants to use their own hardware. We've used LIMA for now, was too much of a hussle. But if there's a more native experience – would give it another try.

Seems like wsl (windows subsystem for linux)

How is this different from Virtualbox or similar products with a shared folder with the host machine? I expected that existing virtualization tech for Macs already did that. Maybe the improvement is having nothing to configure.

By the way, is it headless or can it run a full Linux desktop? Use case: buy a Mac, uninistall whatever can be uninstalled, run the Linux VM as primary desktop forgetting MacOS and without going through Asahi and the incomplete hardware support.

Wouldn’t it be nice if services like Codespaces or Coder or Gitlab would allow you to target running on their hosted/integrated platform, or let you launch that same container completely locally? Sometimes I wanna take my “remote” dev environment off-line but still benefit from the integrated UX.

With the BUILD and WWDC 2026 announcements, it is the Year of Linux Containers Desktop.

Which for many folks is good enough for what they are doing, thus the status quo of desktop platforms will hardly change for current form factors.

Could this allow us to use proton on mac maybe?

I'm pretty sure this is not the use case at all but man do I miss bootcamp. Even for games if we could just run linux without a need for crossover, gaming on mac machines would be a dream.

Oh, I hoped it would be macos contained in those containers. Container for Linux are in millions, while I don't know if there are any with macos inside.

I was wondering if it's possible to have the container volume change to, say, an external drive. I currently use QMEU with qcow2 images to achieve this, works well enough.

Every time I see Apple flaunting Linux containers I can hardly consider it as anything but admitting defeat. It could easily be Darwin, if they still had the capacity.

Why did they have to invent their own solution instead of just shipping docker or an equivalent clone ?

WWDC presentation video:

Discover container machines

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/389/

With colima I can run AMD64 (x86) Linux containers in my Arm64 too. I think this is strictly for Arm64 Linux VMs, or is there some way to run x86 with this too?

This is pretty cool - being able to bring your own container machine image goes a long way to helping it's adoption.

I started using Colima a couple of years ago because I got bored of how bad Docker Desktop was and just started using the CLI / the "Services" tool window in whatever Jetbrains IDE I was using at the time anyway. I can't see myself moving away from it any time - having multiple profiles is an absolute winner of a feature for me there, but maybe the next time I set up a Mac from scratch I'll have a play with this.

Always nice to have more options especially without third party tools

Why it is important ? We have Docker for containers, right ?

I looked at this last year when it came out in Tahoe: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/apple-containerisation and this looks like more of the same.

They've now added a WSL-style virtual machine layer, but there's no x86 container story (Apple's killing Rosetta) so I imagine some qemu shimming will be required.

There's still no equivalent to VPNKit or GVisor for networking so you'll be bridging I think. See: https://cacm.acm.org/research/a-decade-of-docker-containers/ for how Docker for Mac does this

I can't spot any support for dynamic memory ballooning to prevent the hypervisor from gobbling up too much memory. We've had this in Xen since forever! https://xenproject.org/blog/ballooning-rebooting-and-the-fea...

And, most obviously: NO SUPPORT FOR MACOS. This is the single feature that only Apple can do, and they're choosing not to implement it deliberately, and it's so stupid given the pains we all have to go through to implement CI for macOS. In the land of OCaml, we were forced to implement a custom ZFS snapshotter to get reasonably cost effective macOS CI for our package repository: https://tarides.com/blog/2023-08-02-obuilder-on-macos/. This was fun to build, but it sucks to have to maintain it.

Also, I'm really curious what the GPU passthrough story here is for LLMs, since the Apple Silicon -> Linux kernel support is gated on Asahi's support, but that's been lagging beyond M2 due to the efforts of reverse engineering.

Do better for your developers, Apple. This is a half-baked sweep across third-party software without addressing the core needs around your own operating system.

I hope this brought us one step closer to being able to run our distros of choice very freely and easily on a Mac.

It's been over a year since it came out, based on kata-container

And no GPU passthrough? So colima with libkit remains the only method on Apple Silicon?

This blew up spectacularly when combined with Time Machine, I wonder if that’s fixed.

Sounds like toolbox or distrobox for Mac!

I just want thunderbolt pci passthrough for these things.

Would be cool if you can redirect USB devices to the VM.

Im running Multipass on M1 for full linux VMs. Are container machines better?

"LXC" for macOS?

WSL-like implementation on macOS?

I know its not going to be there but wish we had Windows as well.

Will this come to MacOS 27?

LE: nevermind, it is already on MacOS. Did not read everything.

Is this going to be good for AOSP builds on Macs?

Would be nice if they also support Intel based macs, what prevents?

Can Podman support these eventually?

Is it just me or is the experience to get this up and running not feeling very Apple like? Is there no one liner to install or did I miss something?

Just curious, Apple seems to copy orbstack.. haven’t they made an offer to acquire you guys?

darwin containers when?

Is this similar to what cygwin was for windows? Could this be an alternative to homebrew?

What FS mounts the Mac drives into the Linux container ?

It was unclear to me, is this a native replacement for docker? I like docker (on mac) but its quite the resource hog.

I usually run like a db, redis, maybe something like rabbitmq/zeromq and have a app that uses these services (makefile/docker-compose).

I would love to switch if this in fact is a lightweight replacement.

ah, a rare step closer to plan9.

(you remote into a system and part of your environment comes with you; that's very Plan9-like.)

I saw the video on this this is distrobox basically for Mac. It’s very cool. Seamless with your local files and the container. I’m very keen to try it.

Can macOS be run as a container machine on macOS?

looks like apple wrote a native docker in swift

you can now run linux containers on your mac

... but it could be better.

what about (totally contrived):

  FROM apple/macos:10.11.6

  RUN xcodebuild -project myapp.xcodeproj -scheme MyScheme -configuration Release

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so basically dockers

haven't we had hypervisor.framework for like years now?

Yeah but sitting in the tweak circles just to gather personal data about people to make them lose their minds is no bueno. Otipolfueriborsklineypoo

that thepolfus and the Otis and the bors and the alschweid and pretty much anyone in old the the gs gangstalk or just getting people info to sit in the same room as them to try and makr them go crazy deserve to brave hart quartered

I found it hard to believe I didn’t have a simple way of staying safe by installing an arbitrary application in a sandbox on macOS. (Restoring using Time Machine doesn’t count! :) )

This is a step in the right direction but requires any given developer’s buy-in first, right?