Apple quietly makes running Linux containers easier on Macs

With so much news at 2025’s Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, you might be excused for missing that Apple quietly revealed it was releasing and open-sourcing a new open-source containerization framework and a shell tool called Container. Both are designed to create and run Linux containers as lightweight virtual machines (VMs) directly on MacOS.

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This framework is optimized for Apple Silicon and will be natively integrated into the forthcoming MacOS 26 (Tahoe). You can, of course, already run Linux in containers with such third-party container tools as Docker, Podman, and Orbstack. You can also easily run Linux on your older Intel-powered Mac or, with more effort, run Asahi Linux on M-powered Macs. 

Apple Container is written in Swift and licensed under Apache 2. Apple claims these “Containers achieve sub-second start times using an optimized Linux kernel configuration and a minimal root filesystem with a lightweight init system.” You’ll need a minimum of any Mac with Apple Silicon inside, MacOS 15, and Xcode 26 beta. These containers are compliant with the Open Container Initiative.

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The framework uses a custom init system called vminitd, also written in Swift, to manage process launching, filesystem mounting, and host-container communication.

Unlike other container approaches, which run multiple containers in a single, often resource-heavy Linux VM, Apple’s container framework spins up a separate lightweight VM for each container. These VMs are based on Kata Containers, a well-known and well-regarded OpenInfra Foundation project. 

Each container gets its own isolated Linux kernel environment, enhancing security and privacy. The minimal root filesystem excludes most core utilities and dynamic libraries, reducing the attack surface and maintenance overhead.

Every container can also be assigned a dedicated IP address, removing the need for port forwarding and improving network isolation. However, if you try running Container in the current MacOS 15, Sequoia, you can only create the container network with the first container that starts. 

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Since the network XPC, Apple’s basic interprocess communication helper, provides IP addresses to containers, and the helper has to start before the first container, the network helper and vmnet can disagree on the subnet address, resulting in containers that are completely cut off from the network. In short, this is bad news. 

However, this issue will be fixed by the time Tahoe, which is currently in developer beta, ships. For now, though, if you’re trying to run the containers in MacOS 15, you can expect some problems. 

You may be asking yourself, “Why is Apple taking this approach?” Well, the strategy will help developers working on Linux projects, so there must be a demand for it. 

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Apple’s move tacitly acknowledges the central role of Linux containers in modern software development by providing a seamless, high-performance, and secure experience for Mac-using Linux developers. Which, come to think of it, is much like what Microsoft did for Windows-based Linux developers with its Windows Subsystem for Linux. 

By offering native, open-source tools, Apple is positioning MacOS as a first-class platform for container-based development, optimized for its own hardware and developer ecosystem.

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