Documentation on running podman on Virtualbox

[fithisux]

Feature request description

Currently on MacOS podman works by starting a CoreOS instance on QEMU.

Suggest potential solution

We could have an alternative by using VirtualBox instead of QEMU on MacOS. Seems possible but I do not think there is documentation.

Have you considered any alternatives?

There was some steps here:

https://gist.github.com/sagittaros/94d170ef5d7861c66b04026ca4079d0b

but nothing Official

Additional context

No response

[Luap99]

You can setup any linux VM with podman. Remote connections can be added with podman system connection add.
This should describe the basic remote setup: https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorials/mac_win_client.md

In general I don't see us documenting something like this as it would mean some form of support and the docs will likely just become outdated quickly. If you do not want to use podman machine that is fine but we cannot document all kinds of hypervisor setups.

[afbjorklund]

podman-machine (v1) used VirtualBox, but it has fallen out of favor since it doesn't support M1 Macs

It was possible to use it with Vagrant, and to have it support more recent versions of Podman as well.

https://boot2podman.github.io/2020/07/22/machine-replacement.html

Out of curiosity, why do you want to use VirtualBox ? Or why not CoreOS ?

[fithisux]

@afbjorklund it is not a new feature I request. I thought this is an existing one under-documented. If this method is not supported anymore, it is fine. Should be stated explictly in the documentation.

I use what brew provides under my Mac.

[afbjorklund]

It used to be supported (both vbox and qemu), but it was removed in the new Podman Machine with CoreOS.

I just wondered if there was a specific reason to prefer it, like if the feature should be resurrected (or not).

If you are interested in alternatives, I think that limactl start template://podman is the one most up-to-date.

I even did a VirtualBox driver for it - but for now that is mostly for compatibility with older or other systems.

[afbjorklund]

Should be stated explictly in the documentation.

There were some announcements retro-fitted to the old blog posts and repositories, about podman 1.x support:

https://github.com/boot2podman/machine#readme

I think the new docs are mostly about what is supported now, not what is unsupported or was available before.

"Currently on MacOS podman works by starting a CoreOS instance on QEMU."

---

Podman Desktop currently has limited support for Lima virtual machines, even if it can't control them (yet).

It allows running other drivers such as Apple's Virtualization Framework, or other OS such as Fedora Cloud.

If there is demand, it could be made to use VirtualBox or to use TinyCore Linux. But the default is: QEMU.

Other operating systems are possible too, like CentOS Stream or perhaps Alpine. But they have some cons.

[github-actions[bot]]

A friendly reminder that this issue had no activity for 30 days.

[rhatdan]

Converted to a discussion, since this is not something we are likely to support.