Install vfkit with Homebrew, MacPorts, Nix

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• vfkit

Project history

The vfkit repository was created in January 2022, during the period when local VM-based developer tools were adapting to Apple Silicon. CRC had historically used HyperKit on macOS, but the CRC team documented two pressures in 2022: HyperKit was x86_64-only and lacked M1 support, while maintaining QEMU builds would bring a much larger codebase and maintenance surface.

vfkit's design uses Apple's Virtualization framework through Code-Hex/vz Go bindings. Conference material from FOSDEM and Container Plumbing Days in 2023 described the project as a native macOS hypervisor written in Go, intended to wrap Apple's framework in a long-lived CLI process and a Go configuration API.

Adoption history

vfkit's first clear adoption niche was CRC and podman-machine style local container virtualization on macOS. Container Plumbing Days 2023 explicitly described vfkit as a good fit for crc and podman-machine because Apple's framework offered modern Linux VM features on macOS while keeping the hypervisor codebase small.

The tool has also become visible as a standalone package in developer package managers, but its main significance remains as infrastructure beneath higher-level local development environments rather than as a general desktop VM application.

How it is used

Users invoke vfkit with explicit VM resources, a bootloader, disk images, and devices such as virtio-serial, virtio-fs, virtio-blk, virtio-rng, and virtio-net. The process starts the VM when vfkit starts and terminates it when vfkit exits, which fits supervisor-driven tools that need a controllable VM process.

The project also exposes github.com/crc-org/vfkit/pkg/config so Go programs can generate vfkit command lines programmatically. That API is useful for tools such as CRC that want to own the user workflow while delegating the macOS VM monitor layer to vfkit.

Why package nerds care

vfkit is one of the small command-line answers to a packaging-era problem created by Apple's architecture transition: how to ship local Linux VM support on macOS without bundling a large cross-platform emulator stack. Its importance is mainly in the Mac developer-tooling layer where container engines and Kubernetes distributions need reproducible VM startup.

Timeline

• 2022-01: crc-org/vfkit was created on GitHub.
• 2022-06: CRC documented the need to move beyond HyperKit for M1 support and evaluated Apple's Virtualization framework.
• 2023-02: vfkit was presented in the FOSDEM Go devroom as a native macOS hypervisor written in Go.
• 2023: Container Plumbing Days presented vfkit as a minimal hypervisor using Apple's Virtualization framework and suitable for crc and podman-machine.
• 2026-01: GitHub releases show vfkit v0.6.x releases.

Related projects

• vfkit is closely related to crc-org/crc, Podman machine, Apple's Virtualization framework, HyperKit, QEMU, and Code-Hex/vz. In this family, vfkit is the narrow CLI layer over Apple's framework rather than a broad emulator or a full user-facing VM manager.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/crc-org/vfkit
• https://api.github.com/repos/crc-org/vfkit/releases?per_page=3
• https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/govfkit/attachments/slides/5847/export/events/attachments/govfkit/slides/5847/fosdem2023_go_devroom_vfkit.pdf
• https://containerplumbing.org/sessions/2023/vfkit_a_minimal_.html
• https://crc.dev/blog/posts/2022-06-15-vfkit/
• https://github.com/crc-org/vfkit
• https://github.com/crc-org/vfkit/blob/main/doc/usage.md