I'm curious about what will happen when Apple eventually phases out Rosetta 2 in the next year or two. If I'm using Docker Desktop on an Apple Silicon machine, will Linux amd64 images still work? Just trying to understand the future compatibility here.
5 Answers
Yes, the images will run, but they won’t be as efficient as the ARM versions. I've got Docker running through OrbStack on my M1, and I'm using an amd64-only ElasticSearch image. It works but does throw some warnings.
You should definitely check out OrbStack. It’s really impressive on Mac and offers better speed and broader platform and stack support than Docker.
I might be off base here, but I wonder if Apple is trying to push us towards using their container system instead of relying on Docker.
There are a couple of potential scenarios. First, QEMU will likely still be available, though it might run slower. Docker could implement it similarly to how Podman and Colima do. Second, if Apple drops support for Intel binary execution, we'll just have less compatibility with newer Intel or AMD operations, but the VM and translation code could still exist.
I’m using QEMU and Colima on my ARM machine to closely mirror my AMD64 server. I don’t think Roestta is involved in this setup, but I could be mistaken.
But keep in mind, OrbStack also relies on Rosetta 2. So, there might still be some issues down the line.