MACVZ

This project is inspired by and a rewrite of lima-vm.

The major difference is macvz uses macOS new Virtualization API instead of QEMU for spinning up VM's.

Requirements

• Higher or equal to macOS monterey (12.2)
• Golang

Getting Started

Installation via Homebrew

• Run brew install mac-vz/tap/macvz to install macvz

Installation via source

• Run make all to compile and build binary
• Run make install to install the binary to /usr/local

Using macvz as a alternate for Docker Desktop

To start a Docker VM, run the following command

macvz start https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mac-vz/macvz/main/examples/docker.yaml

Execute the following command in macOS host to update docker.sock location

export DOCKER_HOST=unix://${HOME}/.macvz/docker/sock/docker.sock

That's it !!

Other macvz commands

To get shell access to a running VM,

macvz shell docker

To stop a running VM,

macvz stop docker

Features

• Ability to start, stop and shell access
• Filesystem mounting using virtfs (See the performance report below)
• Automatic Port forwarding
• Custom DNS Resolution (like host.docker.internal)

Planned

• Support for commands like list, delete, pause, resume
• Support for different linux distros

Performance Summary

Summary of filesystem performance with colima

The following table contains result summary of some different workloads tested against macvz and colima

Summary for IOPS (Input Ouput Per Second)

Workload	Summary	macvz	colima
Sequential Reads	macvz handles 8x higher operations	620K	77K
Random Reads	macvz handles 3x higher operations	82K	25K
Random Reads/Writes	macvz handles 3x higher operations	37K/12K	14K/4K
Sequential writes	macvz performs almost equally	37K	38K
Random writes	macvz performs almost equally	22K	30K

Summary for Bandwidth (Maximum amount of data transmitted)

Workload	Summary	macvz	colima
Sequential Reads	macvz handles 8x more data	2500MB	306MB
Random Reads	macvz handles 3x more data	320MB	98MB
Random Reads/Writes	macvz handles 3x more data	140MB/50MB	60MB/20MB
Sequential writes	macvz performs almost equally	145MB	150MB
Random writes	macvz performs almost equally	90MB	110MB

Check out Wiki page Why use virtualization framework for detailed information

Project Status

⚠️ The project is still in early stage development and may introduce breaking changes.

Supporters