Has anyone else been running Docker on an Apple Silicon Mac? I love mine but it took a while to work out how to build an x86 image for prod so I wrote a quick blog post to save others the trouble. 🙂

[Blog post here](https://jaimyn.com.au/how-to-build-multi-architecture-docker-images-on-an-m1-mac/)

6 thoughts on “Has anyone else been running Docker on an Apple Silicon Mac? I love mine but it took a while to work out how to build an x86 image for prod so I wrote a quick blog post to save others the trouble. 🙂”

  1. Hmmm …. This is going to be troublesome for our developers, as system upgrades start propagating. Thanks for the info!

    I hope something more … streamline … comes out soon. Some our developers have a hard enough time managing cli parameters … I hate to have to explain why they need to use `buildx` vs `build` and the operation tools now … I’ll need to compensate for these. Ugh…

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  2. I’ve been building multi-arch images on Linux with buildx and QEMU for a few months now, thanks to a home Raspberry Pi K8s cluster. Figuring out how to do it was quite the pain, and although I feel your pain, I’m glad to see you going through it because I’m hoping that with Apple moving to arm, multi-arch development will get more attention. Especially as new chips like RISC-V come out. I’ve also repurposed an old edge router running MIPS and if I can get the kernel compiled correctly for it, I want to add it to my cluster. (It has a kernel, but one which is stripped down and missing much critical functionality.)

    I’ve been pretty scared that amd64 will be The One True Arch moving forward with containerization, which would be a shame since in theory container manifests should be able to handle multi-arch with ease. There’s no reason not to utilize all the resources at your disposal. If you can get the Linux kernel compiled for it, and there’s a C compiler for it, then gosh darnit, it’s just another computer and should be able to be utilized as such!

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  3. Nice post, well done!

    Indeed, there are currently [several known issues](https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/apple-m1/#known-issues) with Docker on the silicon macs.
    If you want to keep track of the current progress, there’s also quite an exhausitve discussion in the Docker GitHub repo: [https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/142](https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/142)

    As of today, the Applice M1 Tech Preview should support it as it is now freely available as download at [https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/apple-m1/](https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/apple-m1/). But – as it is tech preview – could still be buggy.

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  4. So let’s be honest. M1 is a no go, except for the IOS development. Major cloud providers are running 90% of infrastructure on top of x86 architecture. I don’t want to spend any more time on troubleshooting multi-arch images etc. Life too short. After years, moving back to Win10, looks like WSL2 will do the job for me.

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