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/

It’s obvious the resignation led to reassignment of the project, not the other way around.

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.

That sounds like Hypervisor.framework (hvf) not Apple's virtualisation framework, which is independent.

UTM does "already" if you enable "Use Hypervisor"

This is the most performant option for virtualization on arm64 Mac, right?

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.

This works so long as your build isn't compute intensive. From my experience, you need real ARM (or cross compile) for stuff like C++.

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?

Community contribution is definitely one of the goals.

And I mean, it got open sourced 2 days ago...so 100 stars is not that I bad I think...

And the trend is pretty positive https://porter.io/github.com/finos/legend

Would love to hear your feedback