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We rebuilt the Linux MicroVM stack on Apple Silicon
- huerne 2mo agoVZ.framework is very limited, Hypervisor.framework is the better analogue to KVM
- jdub 2mo agoVirtualization.framework isn't particularly limited, for what it is... given they're using Firecracker on Linux, it makes sense to use a similarly high level API on macOS. (One could add a Hypervisor.framework backend to Firecracker, though I'd be surprised if AWS accepted it.)
- kombine 2mo ago> most engineers at Encore develop on a Mac They are solving the wrong problem.
- rob_c 2mo agoNo, they're realists. Plus show me an off the shelf solution to MDM that exists in the Linux space? (Not too mention an easy to buy consumer devices which supports suspend/resume correctly in 2026, not even Windows can do that any more) Apple is crap and evil about many things, but at least here they know their paying audience...
- mhast 2mo agoOne case where Apple can be very useful is if you're traveling a lot for work. Wherever you are you can probably find a local store that sells and services Macbooks. So if your machine is damaged during a trip you can get it fixed, or buy a replacement on the spot, and at least get through the work you are there to do. For small-ish companies that can be a very useful feature.
- elAhmo 2mo agoBuying on the spot - sure. Anything that requires repair has to be usually booked in advance with some waiting time. Relatively short, usually days, but still not really possible to go into the store and get your laptop fixed right away in most cases.
- superb_dev 2mo agoThe wait can be pretty short, I once got the charging port on my iPhone replaced same day at an Apple Store in Vegas
- dijit 2mo agoIf you have a business relationship with Apple, it's same-day service. You don't even have to be a large corp for that, my org was 60 people with like 20 Macbooks and we had it. FWIW if you live in a major metro area, Dell also does this, it's not terribly uncommon for business class machines.
- jtbayly 2mo agoWith the memory shortage, many places you can’t buy most models on the spot. Wait times are almost two months for some machines right now. https://tidbits.com/2026/08/10/mac-delivery-times-stretch-to-months-for-some-models/ https://tidbits.com/2026/08/10/mac-delivery-times-stretch-to...
- ErroneousBosh 2mo agoWhy wouldn't you do that with any other platform? Buy any laptop, stick Linux on it, get working. Buy a cheap shitty Chromebook, ssh to your dev platform, give it to some school child who doesn't have a laptop when you get your real one back. You don't need to be locked into Apple's ecosystem for that.
- dofm 2mo ago> Buy any laptop, stick Linux on it, get working. Except it's still a slightly different challenge each time to "get it working", each different PC. A Mac is a Mac is a Mac, more or less. I have a nice Framework laptop on my desk running Kubuntu alongside my Macs. Every now and then I check in, make sure I could switch to it if I needed to, test all my important tasks, plug it in so the stupid mainboard battery does not go flat. And then I go back to my Mac, because I prefer it and even Tahoe isn't painful enough to switch. KDE is fine and I'll use it if circumstances dictate I have to. I think critics misunderstand the extent to which Mac-using devs are "locked into Apple's ecosystem". Unless you're writing iOS apps, you aren't. You perhaps even exist in a more heterogeneous world (Mac and Linux, Mac and Windows, all three) than a Linux-using web dev does. Essentially everything I run is not at all "locked in". I would miss the ease of keychain, handoff and Apple Notes (which I like despite its flaws). And then I'd deal with it. I'd probably carry on using an iPhone (I am very ambivalent about the iPad) FWIW my "Apple ecosystem" is why I have been able to teach myself open weights/open source AI at a pragmatic level, because my secondhand off-the-shelf kit does an acceptable job of it without me yet having to specify a PC I don't have enough use for as a non-gamer. A lot of people have solved a lot of general problems that I don't have to tinker with too early. This isn't a fanboy thing (I would consider myself a qualified critic). Both KDE and GNOME have some nice things. It's just a question of energies. IIRC it was Adrian Cockcroft who said he used Sun at work, and a Mac at home, because performance tuning was his day job and he didn't want to do it at home; I think this resonates. It has been my own choice for 28 years, largely: Mac plus linux.
- asdf88990 2mo agoLots of Lenavo laptops do just fine, but Apple hardware is still supreme for what it is worth.
- MadsRC 2mo agoFleetDM comes to mind
- esseph 2mo ago> MDM Linux Jumpcloud, I've used it across Windows / Mac / Linux end user desktops and laptop fleets. https://jumpcloud.com/lp/cross-os-device-management-fava-bean https://jumpcloud.com/lp/cross-os-device-management-fava-bea...
- Melatonic 2mo agoI was skeptical at first but we have deployed it and mostly has been solid. They also add new features quite regularly.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2mo agoHacker News is so utterly detached from reality at times, and comments like these really drive that home.
- mathisfun123 2mo agoMost tech people are utterly detached from reality so that definitely tracks
- TN1ck 2mo agoThought I was tripping, someone made the same point today in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381236
- AlexeyBelov 2mo agoNotice dang's comment below. I dislike such comments, especially when they have no details whatsoever, just a swipe.
- bigyabai 2mo agoHacker News is? I worked on an internal tooling team at the beginning of the Apple Silicon transition; we spent months fixing ARM runtime issues that none of our customers encountered. That company probably spent millions of dollars fixing bugs that would never appear in production.
- github_vibe 2mo agoI just encountered the `com.apple.private.virtualization` entitlement limitation just last night, wanting to use VZVirtualMachine private AccessorEndpoint api. There's lot of useful stuff hidden in Apple's Private API space. Great write up! I enjoy seeing others working in the same problem space.
- bit_rot73 2mo agoFour years on a shared remote machine before building the local backend is a good lesson in when to invest in dev tooling versus living with the workaround.
- techpression 2mo agoI think Encore is great and do really cool things, but this post is AI;DR from the first sentence.
- mrbluecoat 2mo agoLOL, I hadn't heard "AI;DR" before. Definitely adding to my acronym toolbox :)
- dolmen 2mo agoWhat an awful blog renderer that, in Firefox, works when scrolling with the trackpad, but doesn't work when using keyboard arrow keys or pageUp/down: I get blank pages when scrolling with the keyboard beyond the initial viewport.
- bartvk 2mo agoI thought it was just me. Super weird.
- klausa 2mo agoWow, that's actually an impressive new failure mode; and it happens on Safari too.
- andout_ 2mo agoSorry about that - just pushed a fix :)
- bheadmaster 2mo agoAre there any technical reasons to override native scrolling functionality in the first place?
- techpression 2mo agoNo, it's a design thing, it hurts A11Y especially.
- yesb 2mo agoGenerally I think the person implementing it has a poor native scrolling experience due to poor hardware and/or software and the hijacked behavior seems better to them.
- marysol5 2mo agoI assume it's because the side bar on the right tracks with your view
- hibbelig 2mo ago
- bittermandel 2mo agoBy experience, getting Firecracker to run well on M-series macs is quite the undertaking. I'm not at all surprised Encore decided to take this path considering their customer base! At Lovable we decided to spend ~1 engineering month getting our sandbox infrastructure to be 100% runnable on Mac and on Linux with predictable builds using Bazel etc. But we actively decided to take a different route than Encore and run nested virtualization, which on macOS means vfkit -> QEMU -> Kind + Firecracker vm(s). It's been invaluable to get the same development and testing tools on both platforms tbh.
- drunkonvinyl 2mo agoI’d like to learn more about doing this myself - do you recommend any good guides or posts?
- bittermandel 2mo agoI should do a write-up! Maybe you'll see it posted here soon. We could basically find nothing online...
- srcreigh 2mo agoNote M1 and M2 macs don’t have hardware support for nested virt.
- andout_ 2mo agoHey everyone - author of the article here! Happy to take questions.
- bojangleslover 2mo agoThis is unbelievably cool. How did you use AI for this? Absolutely not suggesting there's anything wrong with it - quite the contrary. I find AI is most useful for these lower level driver type projects such as yours that one knows are possible but that would be very onerous for a human to implement. For example the guy who re-wrote a driver from scratch for his HP Printer the other day. Do you think you could have done this without AI? I've been migrating people off of AWS recently and it was absolutely made possible (or at least expedient) by AI.
- fideloper 2mo agothis all closed source?
- mpalmer 2mo agoIt is way more accurate to say you authorized this rather than authored it. Honestly asking, do you think this post is easy/enjoyable for people to read? Do you intend for people to just paste it into an LLM chat to digest it?
- egorfine 2mo agoThe project is immensely cool, but please please do not use AI for writing. Very hard to read.
- 8bitbeep 2mo agoThe author of the article is Claude.
- gregwebs 2mo agoYou mentioned libkrun in the post, but I am not clear on why you chose not to use it for Mac even if you want to stick with Firecracker on Linux. Why not use libkrun?
- jiqiren 2mo ago"You can even get /dev/kvm inside a Linux VM on an M3 or later running macOS 15, which runs Firecracker unmodified." I'm very confused why any SWE is on a M1 or M2 Mac. I've always gotten a new machine at $CORP every 2 years...
- dijit 2mo agoit's pretty common to be running a 4 year old computer in most companies I've worked. I think they plan for 3 years but in reality it becomes closer to 4 (because they don't plan the refresh during the actual hardware refresh cycle, so you'll end up with a computer that was released in September the year before in like August the year after). I've never worked anywhere that replaced my computer after 2 years.
- jonathanlydall 2mo agoI'm very surprised you feel it's a given that every SWE at every company has the perk of getting a new machine as quickly as every 2 years, I doubt it's justified by the productivity increases of just 2 years of hardware improvements.
- jml78 2mo agoI am on an M1 macbook pro. My company will upgrade me anytime I want. I haven’t asked because my current laptop is more than ok.
- nxc18 2mo agoThings were painful in the Intel era but I’m on M1 Mac and I’d have a really hard time justifying a request for an upgrade. I absolutely detested my old Intel MacBook (touchbar era) and couldn’t wait to get rid of it. I run bloated slow electron apps and chrome all day, generally with profligate usage patterns, and things hardly ever slow down even with corporate antimalware. Sometimes I forget about having left Windows VMs running in the background. Anyway, why would my company spend $2500+ every two years to turn instant into instant?
- isodev 2mo agoBecause prices? Have you seen how much Apple products cost these days? Also, M1/M2 are perfectly fine and capable hardware. It's hard to justify the upgrade outside some artificial constraints Apple would bring in with a macOS update.
- pranav_tech26 2mo ago[flagged]
- arpitaks 2mo agoVery hard to read
- ricardobeat 2mo agoAgreed. Pacing is off, too dense. It feels like AI wrote it, then they did another round of AI to change the tone and light edits.
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- TechLatestnet 2mo ago[dead]
- bomewish 2mo agoThis seems great tech but the obvious obvious LLM slop writing is just so incredibly off-putting. We read LLM slop everyday ourselves, but now we have to read it everywhere else too. Is this stuff so hard to just write oneself ??
- dimitrybazouka 2mo agonice
- omair_inam 2mo agoA suggestion to the author -- don't outsource your writing to AI, or, if you do, go over it with a fine-tooth comb and remove every trace of Claudisms from it. I read the subtitle: "What it takes to boot the same microVMs on Apple's hypervisor, and the one capability Apple will not let you have." and immediately navigated away.
- nhod 2mo agoAgreed, and then the actual text of the post gets worse. It’s actually unreadable; I literally could not follow what the article was about (without putting in the effort to unravel the Claudisms, a little like unraveling Shakespeare or Finnegan’s Wake) and gave up. It seems we are all (on HN) thoroughly convinced that the models have all gotten worse at writing as the version numbers have gone up and they are supposedly more powerful models. Sol 5.6 is nowhere near as bad as Opus 5 or even the 4 series but not great. But looking back there was a time we were enamored with how they wrote. Perhaps it’s related to the newfound prohibitions on “write in this writer’s style”? I wonder if training the models to not be able to do that anymore has steered them towards not being able to write, at all, in any existing human good writing style and they are navigating the small pathway through all existing good human writing to whatever you want to call what they are doing now?
- mpalmer 2mo agoI'm willing to bet it's because model providers have gone all-in on programming and reasoning ability when training new models. It's where the money is, if nothing else, and the writing quality will have suffered as a knock on effect.
- luckydata 2mo agoSomeone should build a capable technical writing model, would make a TON of money
- gedy 2mo agoIt was the newness and surprise that the quality was as good as it was, just like images from Stable Diffusion, etc. Now that we are used to it, we notice the uncanny valley speak.
- mococa 2mo agoThis article was made for LLMs reading, not for human reading.
- noobplus 2mo agoGreat article!
- DomBlack 2mo agoI saw this blog post title and wanted to read it, as I thought this is something we really wanted when I worked back at Encore - and lo and behold what website I ended up on! Great work lads, seeing those old shell scripts brought back memories, but this is awesome to see you've solved the problem now to make your own lives easier! Any plans to open source crackling? I was looking into cross platform microVM's after reading about sbx recently.
- chrisweekly 2mo agosee also "smolvm" - the awesome microvms from https://smolmachines.com https://smolmachines.com
- appcypher 2mo agomicrosandbox is open-source and runs on linux, macos and windows: https://github.com/superradcompany/microsandbox/ https://github.com/superradcompany/microsandbox/
- chrisweekly 2mo agoI wonder how necessary/useful this is, in light of the amazing smolvm microvms from https://smolmachines.com https://smolmachines.com. (Not snark, not affiliated, just happy and impressed with smolvm and genuinely curious.)
- Alien1Being 2mo agoAI written... AI Slop; Did Not Read
- peter_d_sherman 2mo agoI don't use MacOS. I don't use MacOS because it is not Open Source. I don't use Windows. I used Windows extensively in the past, but I don't use it in 2026, because it is not Open Source. Anytime you're dealing with a closed source OS, you're dealing with the following things: 1) Extra time/effort/complexity to make your programs work correctly. 2) Extra time/effort/complexity to make your already working working programs keep working through OS version updates, upgrades, patches, etc., etc. This article (AI written, not AI written, I don't care) describes something that is overly complex (proof that you don't have and/or cannot access the source code of the underlying operating system) and something which could potentially fail when Apple releases its next OS or OS upgrade... If you switch to an Open Source operating system (and I'm not trying to shill for Linux here -- OpenBSD, etc., any open source Operating System could work too), then most of these problems will disappear -- or at least be reduced rather significantly. But what I'm most concerned about is the complexity... Now, you're welcome to engineer whatever additional complexity above Apple's stack -- many companies do this and are more than willing to pay the price in additional time, resources, programmers, tech people handling whatever issues arise, as they arise. I'm not against Apple -- I think their products have beautiful aesthetics, and every company, every producer of physical products on the planet could take a lesson from their design teams. Their products are absolutely stunningly visually appealing! But Apple in turn, could take a lesson from Linux and every other open source OS on the planet. I personally will not develop for any Apple product unless and until Apple open sources their OS'es. If code that I write coincidentally runs on an Apple product, hey that's a happy coincidence! Yay! But I never expect it to, and I never expect to keep working across OS versions and upgrades. If anyone thinks I'm being unfair to Apple, then I'll state for the record that I have the exact same expectations (or negative expectations, as the case may be!) about Microsoft Windows! Closed source OS'es lead to complexity, work-arounds ("oh no, API call <abc> isn't working the way we thought it would under these conditions -- well, use this work-around and call API <xyz> with this unnecessary and overly complex data structure after making 3 other unnecessary API calls and then you need to do the following additional steps..."), and software breaking over time over OS version upgrades, updates, patches, and the like. On the one hand, I'm very glad that this article is bringing micro VM's to Apple. That's a good idea! (But on the other hand, I have to ask if the complexity is worth it... but I'm not the guy who pays these guys' salaries or the future support guys' salaries, so I can't determine if it is or isn't, if the trade-off is worth it!) On the positive side though, bringing Micro VM's to Apple is a good idea, at least in its purest idea form ("we want to add functionality X to platform Y" -- there's nothing wrong with the intention to add value to something -- in fact, quite the opposite! The whole of Western Civilization is based on that idea!)