Running Podman containers in Apple Container VM

[afbjorklund]

I did a small demonstration on the Podman October community meeting, about this very topic.

As a VM provider on macOS it (AC) is similar to WSL2 on Windows or to Kata Containers on Linux.

See https://podman.io/community and https://github.com/apple/container

$ container run -it fedora

# dnf install -y podman

Then I showed how you can install systemd and use it instead of cgroupfs.

FROM fedora
RUN dnf install -y systemd
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/lib/systemd/systemd"]
STOPSIGNAL SIGRTMIN+3

$ container=$(container run -d fedora-systemd)
$ container exec -it $container bash

• run kubernetes apple/container#81 (also how to run kind)

• Add systemd support for container apple/container#92

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Some minor details that were missed:

1. You need to use iptables instead of nftables, due to things missing in the default kernel.
   Installing the "iptables-legacy" package, and changing the default configuration should be enough.

2. There is only support for IPv6, some network things are missing for IPv6 in the default kernel.
   Installing the "procps-ng" package, and disabling the IPv6 support using "sysctl" should be enough.

3. You can build your own custom kernel, and pass it as a parameter to the container run command.

4. The default machine only gets 1 GiB of memory, but there are parameters for cpus and memory too.

Other discussions about Apple Container:

• change podman to implement macOS new container API #26395

• The Lima container drivers lima-vm/lima#3829 with AC/DC 🎸 drivers