Recent macOS has native hypervisor support via amework which allows software like 'XHyve' (docker on macOS uses this), but lacks the necessary services under the hood to fully virtualize operating system services.

This is very powerful, but quite resource intensive - each virtual machine must have its own copy of the operating system. devices are emulated in software and presented to an operating system running in the container. (Put another way, the OS services are virtualized.) Compare this to hardware virtualization, where what is virtualized is the hardware - e.g. OS (operating system) virtualization is how we generally refer to this type of 'light-weight' virtualization, where processes think they see a virtual kernel, but are all sharing the same real kernel under the hood that kernel acts as a sort of hypervisor in ensuring that container/virtualization boundaries are not crossed. (For example, a container may have its own TCP/IP stack, with its own IP address, ARP cache, etc.) FreeBSD Jails, Linux 'containers' (or more correctly 'namespaces'), and Solaris/illumos zones all offer some degree of 'virtualization' of these operating system system services.īy virtualization, this means that these servers are available (or potentially available) to things inside the 'container', but in a way that protects the other things on the same host outside the container.

A key element required for containerization is isolation of networking and other services, but not just isolation but also virtualization.

Utm apple virtualization linux kernel