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I installed Docker on my macOS Sierra as follows. Note I don't have VirtualBox installed.
brew cask uninstall virtualbox brew cask install docker My macOS details.
$ uname -a Darwin m-C02QG7TRG8WN.local 16.5.0 Darwin Kernel Version 16.5.0: Fri Mar 3 16:52:33 PST 2017; root:xnu-3789.51.2~3/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64 $ docker version Client: Version: 17.03.1-ce API version: 1.27 Go version: go1.7.5 Git commit: c6d412e Built: Tue Mar 28 00:40:02 2017 OS/Arch: darwin/amd64 Server: Version: 17.03.1-ce API version: 1.27 (minimum version 1.12) Go version: go1.7.5 Git commit: c6d412e Built: Fri Mar 24 00:00:50 2017 OS/Arch: linux/amd64 Experimental: true Once I run Docker from launchpad, I am able to run Docker containers.
$ docker run -it ubuntu root@2351d4222a4e:/# uname -a Linux 2351d4222a4e 4.9.13-moby #1 SMP Sat Mar 25 02:48:44 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux My question is how does Docker manage to run a Linux kernel within macOS? I thought Docker would at least require boot2docker or some other such Linux kernel running so that it can create the Ubuntu's filesystem with the help of it. But the above output seems to indicate that it is not so. Where does the Linux kernel come from then?
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Linux containers Many people do not realize that containers are really Linux. As such, Linux containers cannot run natively on macOS. Therefore, the containers must run in a Linux virtual machine (VM), and a Podman client interacts with that VM. This is in line with all solutions for running containers on macOS.
Docker is a popular open-source project written in go and developed by Dotcloud (A PaaS Company). It is a container engine that uses the Linux Kernel features like namespaces and control groups to create containers on top of an operating system. So you can call it OS-level virtualization.
Docker uses resource isolation features of the Linux kernel such as cgroups and kernel namespaces to allow independent "containers" to run within a single Linux instance, avoiding the overhead of starting virtual machines.
Docker for Mac is a native MacOS X application that embeds a hypervisor (based on xhyve), a Linux distribution and filesystem and network sharing that is much more Mac native. You just drag-and-drop the Mac application to /Applications, run it, and the Docker CLI just works.
While the other answers are correct about the hypervisor, they don't answer your specific question.
The answer is "Docker [Desktop] for Mac" does run a Linux host VM with a replacement for boot2docker - LinuxKit developed and maintained by Docker for the purpose of making lightweight distributions.
https://blog.docker.com/2017/04/introducing-linuxkit-container-os-toolkit/
The uname you saw didn't have the keyword in it, but it seems to be included now, e.g. from Docker for Mac 18.03.1 I see:
Linux a8e079429a51 4.9.87-linuxkit-aufs #1 SMP Wed Mar 14 15:12:16 UTC 2018 x86_64 Linux You can see links to the included versions on the release pages. https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/release-notes/
So it's not so different from the old days Docker Machine + VirtualBox + boot2docker,
for the new days, it's just the provisioning is done internally by "Docker [Desktop] for Mac" and VirtualBox is replaced by Apple's Hyperkit, and the "default VM" is a bit more tucked away.
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The early version Docker used VirtualBox to run virtual machine for Docker. Since June 2016, the way to run Docker on Mac and Windows became much simpler, there's the official release introduction blog for Docker on Mac/Windows, and there's also some introduction from docker mac website:
Docker for Mac is a complete development environment deeply integrated with the MacOS Hypervisor framework, networking and filesystem.
And with the structure looks like:
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