Ask HN: What's the State of Docker on Apple Silicon?

5 points by iwebdevfromhome 3 years ago | 9 comments

It's been a few years since the release of apple silicon. The reason why I haven't made the change yet from my trusty 2019 i7 mbp is because of all the articles I read back in the day when the new architecture was first released.

Using docker on m1 processors involved using rosetta and making changes to your application dev. configuration to specify the use of x86_64.

Is this still the case?

People who use Apple Silicon processors as your daily drivers and make use of Docker in development. What is your experience ?

mosen 3 years ago |

I've tried Docker Desktop, Rancher, Colima, all with various settings (including the disk ones), and it's always very, very slow for me (M1 Macbook Pro 16). This is when developing with both a .NET 7 stack and a Node stack.

I tried creating a VM and pointing my DOCKER_HOST to that, but it's still slow. The main problem is that I'm trying to work with AMD64 on an ARM64 (due to my constraints).

I'm going to set up an old non-M1 box in my office and use that as my Docker host. I am also tempted to use a cheap remote instance for when I'm OOO.

iwebdevfromhome 3 years ago | |

That’s very sad to hear. I was hoping that it was at least somewhat better with the release of Docker for Apple Silicon in 2021. I have very minimal use of docker most of the time but sometimes I require more use of it and I can see myself getting frustrated when I need to perform multiple builds.

idontwantthis 3 years ago | |

Have you turned on VirtioFS? With that on, it's not slow for me at all. I'm using a mix of ARM and AMD images. I have my source code mounted into running containers and there is no issue.

adamhp 3 years ago |

Docker on my M1 seems fine? Haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary. Running a basic little 5-6 container django/celery/nextjs setup and no noticeable performance issues.

iwebdevfromhome 3 years ago | |

So the same performance as an intel mac without having to change anything in the docker config ?

adamhp 3 years ago | | |

I guess that depends on how you're measuring, but I don't have a side-by-side of a recent Intel mac to compare, really.

softwaredoug 3 years ago |

I use docker on my m1 and have 0 issues. Docker on Mac already runs in a VM so I’m not sure why there’d be a difference once the underlying VM works?

yuppie_scum 3 years ago |

Podman is the path forward.

iwebdevfromhome 3 years ago | |

what are the advantages of podman over the classic Docker for mac ?