The new Mac equipped with the Apple M1 chip has attracted a large number of developers with its outstanding performance and competitive price. The credit is due to the Apple M1 chip based on the ARM architecture. However, it is this chip that discourages some developers who have specific software needs.
If you rely heavily on Docker in your daily work or development, and use the Mac as the main machine, it is currently recommended to carefully purchase the ARM version of the Mac. Because there are developers feedback Docker can not start on a device equipped with Apple Silicon's. However, judging from the developer's feedback, the device he used is not equipped with the Apple M1 chip, but the earlier A12X.
But this does not affect the current results, because Docker does not run on a Mac equipped with the Apple M1 chip. Although macOS has virtualization capabilities, the Apple M1 chip also supports virtualization-but this support has not yet been ported to Docker. A developer pointed out that from Apple's documentation, users may not be able to perform emulation and virtualization at the same time in the same process. Specifically, users can run x86-based Mac applications on the M1 chip, but at the same time, they may not be able to access x86-based Docker images.
Regarding the compatibility of Apple M1 chip and Docker, the person in charge of Docker Desktop recently responded to this . He pointed out that although Apple released Rosetta 2 to help transfer applications to the new M1 chip, it did not help Docker Desktop. Because it is a virtual machine running under the Docker Desktop client, to implement the same function on Apple's new chip, Docker Desktop needs to be migrated to the hypervisor framework. In addition, all pipelines must be implemented to provide the core experience of Docker Desktop so that docker runcommands can be run on the terminal as it is now .
In addition to adapting to the Apple M1 chip, Docker Desktop also has technical reliance on upstream and needs to be modified before the new version of GA. In order to ensure the quality of the version, the Docker team needs to use appropriate tools to support repeatable and reliable testing, and needs to complete the work including setting up CI for the M1 chip. In addition, it is also important to ensure docker buildthe experience of Docker , because they know that developers have more requirements for multi-architecture construction. Currently buildx supports multi-architecture construction. The Docker team needs to study how to introduce this as part of this version. To simplify everything.