Running Firecracker on M-series Macs via Nested Virtualization
dejavucoder · x · 2026-08-21
A discussion on the challenges and solutions for running Firecracker microVMs on Apple Silicon.
Context
Getting Firecracker to perform well on M-series Macs is known to be difficult.
Lovable's Approach
- Spent 1 engineering month.
- Made sandbox infrastructure 100% runnable on both Mac and Linux.
- Used Bazel for predictable builds.
- Adopted nested virtualization: vfkit -> QEMU -> Kind + Firecracker VM(s) on macOS.
Value
Ensures consistent development and testing tools across platforms.
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