Interesting!

Thanks @slonopotamus

Is it functional right now? eg: if I share the right folders from a linux VM on a mac, is it "working" enough?

@slonopotamus would love to see at least some of that to get in.
Would you still have time and motivation for this?

Whoops, forgot about this. Will see what can be done...

Testing now. Seems to build fine. Had to install buildkit and do some configuration so that containerd would run at a path it has access to.

Currently at this issue:

% sudo _output/nerdctl --address '/opt/containerd/run/containerd.sock' version
Password:
WARN[0000] unable to determine runc version              error="exec: \"runc\": executable file not found in $PATH"
Client:
 Version:	v2.0.3-213-g3c2889e7
 OS/Arch:	darwin/arm64
 Git commit:	3c2889e71ec12431a7d93c2a954674bd12658dc3
 buildctl:
  Version:	0.20.1
  GitCommit:	de56a3c5056341667b5bad71f414ece70b50724f

Server:
 containerd:
  Version:	v1.3.2-vmw
  GitCommit:	
 runc:
  Version:

Looks like runc doesn't support macOS: opencontainers/runc#1733

Will work on that repo I guess and try to port it?

runc can't and won't run on macOS, it is fully tied to Linux.

Yeah I realised that pretty quickly…

So how is this meant to work then?

Well, there is a nonzero amount of other runtime shims that could run natively on macOS (though they might not as of today):

• containerd-shim-spin
• runu
• containerd-shim-wasm
• rund

Note that things these shims run are not a conventional "containers" with Linux userspace in them, but something different. However, nerdctl should not care about this. Its job is to call proper APIs of containerd and pass it parameters that tell containerd to do what user requests.

And by the way, nerdctl already has some kind of FreeBSD support. FreeBSD also cannot run runc (for the same reasons as macOS cannot), however there exists runj shim that can run FreeBSD jails.

Needs rebase