Apple Silicon

Recently I’ve been trying to answer some more questions on stack overflow. For one to be a better member of the community but on the other hand also because I’ve been somewhat interested in joining the Docker Captain’s program and there are some requirements around activity, but that’s a story for a different day. Anyhow, after a lot of more or less simple questions, I landed at a super cool one. The title wasn’t instantly giving away how deep of a rabbit hole I was about to explore: “Minikube to deploy linux/amd64 images on M1 hardware”.

Before you dive deep: This will not give you a working local OpenShift on Apple Silicon but a working CRC using Podman.

At the very end of my last post I briefly mentioned that CodeReady Containers(CRC) were not available for Apple Silicon. Literally two hours later I came across a GitHub Issue that’s functions as an epic ticket for CRC support on M1 and guess what? There’s a new comment hinting to a dev preview version. Naturally, I installed went and tried it and here’s how it went.

After receiving my new M1 powered MacBooks Pro I was happy. Very happy. After all, it was quite the upgrade from the shabby Intel I5 powered MacBook Pro that I was running while still working at Red Hat. Everything is so blazing fast now, and it just feels nice. While I was aware that not all CLI tools have yet been cross-compiled for ARM, I had a tiny “what the fuk” moment when I wanted to get the work on the “Operating OpenShift” book going and found out that basically none of the tooling was ready for Apple Silicon. As you can imagine, not being able to use any of the CLI tooling isn’t really great to write a book about OpenShift. In essence, I couldn’t create clusters or use the oc CLI to interact with any clusters.