Notable too that the VM it runs on Mac comes with qemu user mode emulation and uses binfmt_misc to run binaries for different architectures so obviates the need for Rosetta.
Edit: to try this out compile a “hello world” binary to say arm64 and riscv64 and amd64 and run it all in the same container (be sure to statically link)
Knew it used qemu but didn't know about binfmt_misc. Very cool. I guess that explains why my coworkers with m1 laptops can run our amd64 containers just fine without changes.
Iirc Docker Desktop uses a proprietary VM now, Colima and Podman Desktop use qemu, and I'm not sure about Orbstack (which has come up several times as a lighter weight alternative within this thread.)
