Apple Silicon M1 Chips and Docker

Sounds a bit like Docker is at a loss. Caught between a closed source OS (rock) and an architecture change (hard place).<p>Ideally, they could leverage Rosetta2 to run x64 containers under macOS on Apple Silicon ... but I guess Apple isn&#x27;t playing ball (because otherwise they would have probably announced it at WWDC).<p>At this point I see an Apple Silicon based Mac is just a consumer device, I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m going to be able to use it in anger for development work at the moment (other than for Mac consumer apps).<p>Not really sure what Apple have to lose here ... but if Macs with Apple Silicon are not a viable dev platform for &quot;mainstream&quot; containers, then that&#x27;s going to drive developers to Linux (or Windows).

Here&#x27;s how I expect things to go with Docker on Apple Silicon:<p>- Rosetta 2 will not be involved at all<p>- They will recompile the CLI, daemon and other parts of Docker Desktop natively for arm64 (but this has a dependency on the Go toolchain)<p>- There will likely be a bunch of bugs or general inconsistencies in the new Mac Hypervisor (their dev hardware didn&#x27;t even support virtualization), so it&#x27;s unlikely that Docker&#x27;s Hyperkit will just work out of the box on M1<p>- The above will take till mid-2021 at the earliest, but should hopefully release along with more &quot;pro&quot; Mac hardware<p>- Once it is ready, you should be able to cross-compile and run x86_64 containers on new Macs, considering Docker Desktop will still automatically use QEMU to do the emulation. I expect running native arm64 containers will still be better though.<p>TL;DR - don&#x27;t buy the current lineup of Apple Silicon machines just yet for serious Docker work.<p>Disclaimer: These are all just guesses

Can we give them a full month to sort this out ?<p>I want x64 docker on Arm , as this could also be massive for server power consumption. But things take time . If your some wiz kid who can crack this puzzle you’ll have a billion dollar startup within 6 months<p>As someone who’s published on the App Store , having a single binary run on IPhone , IPad and Mac is a much much bigger deal than most of you realize .

The really perplexing thing to me here is that Docker Desktop...was featured on stage at the Apple event. How? Did Apple just hack it together and get it working? Was it just fake? Was Docker involved at all?<p>I feel like it was implied that Apple was doing the hard work here, but now it looks more like nobody was doing the work, and showing it off working was a hat trick?

This doesn&#x27;t really clear up any of the questions I have.<p>Will docker running on ARM run docker containers from images built for x86? Will docker running on ARM be able to build images for x86?

Apple&#x27;s &quot;demo&quot; showed Docker for mac running, complete with containers. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;bQb1grM.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;bQb1grM.png</a><p>Docker here is saying their &quot;for mac&quot; application dependencies are not even all working yet.<p>Unless I am missing something - Apple&#x27;s Docker on silicon demo was fabricated?

If Docker can run on Raspberry Pi&#x27;s ARM chips, it can run on Mac ARM chips. I expect we&#x27;ll see this working very soon after the new Macs start to arrive.

Apple messed up by not engaging and assissting relevant software vendors with this change in time...

Both Electron and Go were referenced in the article but without links, so I went looking for them to understand how far along this work was. From the pages linked below it seems like with virtualization is the real challenge.<p>Here is a post saying that the latest beta release of Electron supports Apple Silicon: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.electronjs.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;apple-silicon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.electronjs.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;apple-silicon</a><p>And the GitHub issue tracking Go on AS, which mentions that support is coming in version 1.16 scheduled for release on Feb 1st 2021: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go&#x2F;issues&#x2F;38485" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go&#x2F;issues&#x2F;38485</a>

&gt; Along with this, we have technical dependencies upstream of us that need to make changes prior to making a new version of Docker Desktop GA. We rely on things like Go for the backend of Docker Desktop and Electron for the Docker Dashboard to view your Desktop content. We know these projects are hard at work getting ready for M1 chips, and we are watching them closely.<p>The only time I used docker mac ui is to change some docker machine config. If electron is a blocker then I think they can release the beta version without the ui and their users will hardly notice.

Given there is a bunch of software that is still incompatible to run on the new chip, what are all the benchmarks actually testing? I&#x27;m not disregarding the fact that the chip is fast but I&#x27;m just curious

Does docker-machine work? That’s what I’ve been using on my Ryzentosh.

I think there are two questions I have:<p>Will I be able to build&#x2F;run x86 (64bit) docker containers?<p>Will I be able to build&#x2F;run ARM containers (and without &quot;switching&quot; something)?

I would not be surprised if we will soon see a pretty big shift towards ARM on the server&#x2F;cloud side as well.

The virtualization apps for mac&#x2F;win seem to be a big distraction for them and muddy their product image. Trying to hide ISA differences in the next version would be a logical continuation of this track of course... Maybe they should pivot to the WebAssembly direction thay the founder was talking about before.

Gosh, it never occurred to me that the reason the UI was so bloated and slow was because it is using electron!<p>Why couldn’t they just write a quick set of native panels and call it a day? Sigh.

Is this the beginning of application compatibility issues with M1?

Developer transition kit has been around for a while. Docker just found out they needed to buy those?

Maybe building containers for one operating system and architecture from a completely different operating system and architecture is not the best idea.

How many screw ups are we going to give Docker?<p>It has been since July that you can have developer kits for Apple Silicon. This should not have been a surprise.