On macOS you now have access to “container“, a tool that you can use to create and run Linux containers as lightweight virtual machines on your Mac. It’s written in Swift, and optimized for Apple Silicon.
The tool consumes and produces OCI (Open Container Initiative) compatible container images, so you can pull and run images from any standard container registry. You can push images that you build to those registries as well, and run the images in any other OCI-compatible application.
“container” uses the Containerization Swift package for low level container, image, and process management.

To get started with “container” on your Apple Silicon macOS you need access to “brew” or, alternatively, build it by leveraging the code there on GitHub at https://github.com/apple/container.
In my example I’m going to stay focused on the tool utilization and, so, I will leverage “brew” to get “container” installed.

Note: if you want to get “brew” deployed on your macOS, you can follow the community guide at https://brew.sh.

  • Install “container” by “brew”
# brew install container
  • Start the system Container Service
    — This service manages the background daemon that handles container lifecycle operations
# container system start
  • Run your Oracle Linux container on macOS (in this example Oracle Linux 10 slim)
# container run -it --name ol10slim --cpus 2 --memory 8g oraclelinux:10-slim
bash-5.2# cat /etc/oracle-release
Oracle Linux Server release 10.1
  • Options used on the command above:
    -it = Keep the standard input open even if not attached (-i) and open a TTY with the process (-t)
    --name = Use the specified name as the container ID
    --cpus = Number of CPUs to allocate to the container (-c)
    --memory = Amount of memory (1MiByte granularity), with optional K, M, G, T, or P suffix (-m)

Container images you can leverage for Oracle Linux:

oraclelinux:8 – Standard Oracle Linux 8 container image
oraclelinux:8-slim – Reduced and optimized (in term of size) Oracle Linux 8 container image
oraclelinux:8-slim-fips – Reduced, optimized and FIPS enabled Oracle Linux 8 container image

oraclelinux:9 – Standard Oracle Linux 9 container image
oraclelinux:9-slim – Reduced and optimized Oracle Linux 9 container image
oraclelinux:9-slim-fips – Reduced, optimized and FIPS enabled Oracle Linux 9 container image

oraclelinux:10 – Standard Oracle Linux 10 container image
oraclelinux:10-slim – Reduced and optimized (in term of size) Oracle Linux 10 container image

Working with container images

  • List/Manage downloaded container images
# container image list
NAME TAG DIGEST
oraclelinux 10-slim e7dcfab74f0cf104d08a345a…
ghcr.io/apple/containerization/vminit 0.24.5 2c97e1d56bc62220e6970870…
  • Remove one downloadded container image (free-up local disk space)
# container image rm oraclelinux:10-slim
docker.io/library/oraclelinux:10-slim
Reclaimed 216.3 MB in disk space
  • Display information about a specific container image

# container image inspect oraclelinux:10-slim
[{"name":"docker.io\/library\/oraclelinux:10-slim","index":{"digest":"sha256:e7dcfab74f0cf104d08a345a3c9e9af011d53da3c0dfa4f3394821ed87ee11ed","size":2385,"mediaType":"application\/vnd.oci.image.index.v1+json"},"variants":[{"config":{"variant":"v8","created":"2026-02-04T00:25:11.594575333Z","os":"linux","architecture":"arm64","history":[{"created_by":"ADD oraclelinux-10-slim-arm64v8-rootfs.tar.xz \/ # buildkit","created":"2026-02-04T00:25:11.594575333Z","comment":"buildkit.dockerfile.v0"},{"empty_layer":true,"created_by":"CMD [\"\/bin\/bash\"]","created":"2026-02-04T00:25:11.594575333Z","comment":"buildkit.dockerfile.v0"}],"rootfs":{"type":"layers","diff_ids":["sha256:762031a3ab9bad22b9fba28b3b285b76673b297c7ce55c79bd383f5f58fdcd51"]},"config":{"Env":["PATH=\/usr\/local\/sbin:\/usr\/local\/bin:\/usr\/sbin:\/usr\/bin:\/sbin:\/bin"],"WorkingDir":"\/","Cmd":["\/bin\/bash"]}},"size":41442503,"platform":{"variant":"v8","architecture":"arm64","os":"linux"}}]}]

Conclusion

Apple’s container CLI is a welcome addition to the macOS developer toolkit, providing native, lightweight Linux containers built on Virtualization framework without requiring any other external tool.
Its sub-second startup times and strong OS integration make it well-suited for local development.
The project is still evolving (actual release is container CLI version 0.10.0), so users should anticipate some rough edges and potential breaking changes.
Consider trying it out to run your Oracle Linux development environments very quickly.