

It even has faster performance for shared folders, which is another good argument to switch. ConclusionĪfter testing Colima I found it to be a great drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop. We can see that Colima is around 80% faster for both IOPS and bandwidth metrics.įor comparison, the native speed on macOS was 28.6k IOPS and 117MB/s bandwidth.
#Run docker on mac m1 for mac
I’ve used fio to run a quick benchmark in Docker desktop for mac (v4.3.1) and colima (v0.2.2) that performs random 4K writes on a shared volume: fio -name=random-write -ioengine=libaio -rw=randwrite -direct=1 -bs=4k -size=4g -numjobs=1 -iodepth=16 -runtime=60 -time_based -end_fsync=1 -filename=/app/testfile I think it’s worth to test the differences in performance since Docker Desktop uses gRPC FUSE while Colima/Lima uses sshfs to share folders. However, shared folder performance has always been a bottleneck for Docker on macOS. Since both solutions are based on the macOS HVF I don’t think there is much difference in terms of CPU and memory performance. The usage in macOS is no different from Docker Desktop, and all docker commands should work as before. It will start the docker daemon in the VM and configure the docker CLI on the host.
#Run docker on mac m1 install
Installation is easy and can be done through Homebrew: brew install colima

This makes Docker easily usable on macOS without any configuration, similar to Docker Desktop. Lima comes with containerd and nerdctl installed, but for a drop-in replacement the Docker container runtime is required which is what Colima is for.Ĭolima provisions the Docker container runtime in a Lima VM, configures the docker CLI on macOS and handles port-forwarding and volume mounts. It’s based on Lima which creates a QEMU VM with HVF accelerator and handles the port-forwarding and folder sharing. While there is the option to run something like Multipass or VirtualBox with a custom provisioning script for Docker and then configure shared folders, I was looking for a drop-in replacement with minimal or no configuration.Ĭolima fits the criteria well.
