[Proof of Concept] Running Firecracker on macOS with Apple Silicon

[drink7036290]

Hi Firecracker Team,

As discussed in issues #2845 and #4426, I’m aware that running Firecracker on macOS is generally out of scope. However, I’d like to share a minimal proof of concept demonstrating Firecracker booting an aarch64 Linux guest on macOS with Apple Silicon using Apple’s Virtualization Framework.

The proof of concept is on my forked repository here:
https://github.com/drink7036290/firecracker/blob/macos_avf/docs/macos-avf-notes.md

This required disabling many KVM-specific features, so it’s definitely not production-ready. It was more of an experiment (originating from my exploration of Rust and the question, “Why rust-vmm supports KVM only and can’t run on macOS with Apple Silicon?”). In this demo, I can run openssl speed within the guest to confirm near-native performance, suggesting hardware acceleration is working via the Apple Virtualization Framework.

I’m opening this issue primarily to share my findings. Please feel free to close it if it falls outside the project’s goals. Feedback is also welcome if you have any thoughts or insights.

Thank you!

[xmarcalx]

Hi @drink7036290 ,

Thank you very much for your interest in Firecracker and for your work in this issues.

As you already pointed out we do not have plans to support MacOS. However i created this discussion #5019 to showcase your work and make sure you have a space to collect feedback and help other community members interested into this capability.

I am closing the issue in favor of the discussion #5019.