Running Firecracker on macOS with Apple Silicon

[xmarcalx]

Hi community,

@drink7036290 presented in #5017 a novel solution to run Firecracker on macOS.

We do not plan to support Firecracker on macOS any time soon, but considering previous interest, we are moving the findings in this discussion for anyone else who is interested in joining the topic, or would like to provide feedback and chat about this initiative with the author!

Thanks again @drink7036290 for your interest and effort into this topic!

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!