[burke]

As someone working in developer tools for a company with thousands of people developing software on MacBooks, MAN do I resent SIP. I've recently started calling it "Systems Implementation Prevention".

It's incredible that it's 2024 and I can't cobble together anything vaguely container-like on macOS because:

* bind mounts don't exist (?!)

* clonefile() could maaaybe do the job but doesn't work cross-volume and a lot of the stuff outside of /Users is a different volume

* there's no filesystem namespace.

* chroot doesn't work either because /usr/lib/libsystem.B.dylib is required, but also pretend.

* And it sounds like chroot runs afoul of some SIP rule nowadays even if you can get past the above.

* A lot of this could be worked around with FUSE, but in order to turn that on, we'd have to turn off a lot of SIP.

The closest we can get without virtualization is sandbox-exec, which just allows allowing/denying file reads by path, with no path translation. And also is deprecated.

Nevermind that dtrace exists but you're not allowed to use it either.

Truly, the worst UNIX.

[ChocolateGod]

> * A lot of this could be worked around with FUSE, but in order to turn that on, we'd have to turn off a lot of SIP.

Didn't the latest MacOS update add something similar with userspace filesystems

[burke]

File Provider: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fileprovider/

Interesting, I hadn't heard of this. First impression skimming the docs is that they've gone to significant trouble to make it not generically useful as a FUSE replacement but I could be misreading.

[mbirth]

Not macOS directly, but there’s fuse-t which works in userspace and just creates an NFS server which it automatically mounts via macOS-own capabilities.

The library is a drop-in replacement for libfuse and works great for me.

https://www.fuse-t.org

[viraptor]

> Nevermind that dtrace exists but you're not allowed to use it either.

You're not losing anything, dtrace even without SIP has been broken and unusable for at least 2 major versions now.

[pxc]

What's broken in dtrace even with SIP disabled?

[jsolson]

Why do you want to avoid virtualization?

[burke]

It's very heavyweight, and there's no good shared filesystem option.

We did use virtualization for a bunch of stuff before the move to Apple Silicon, back when Hypervisor.framework and xhyve actually existed and were plausibly useful.

Those also fell by the wayside in the architecture migration and now virtualization has a massive performance cost.

Apparently the M4 chips are on ARMv9 which is apparently much better at virtualization, but it remains to be seen whether apple provides anything lightweight again.

[m463]

> Truly, the worst UNIX.

You're not the target market.

:(

[Vilian]

It's still the worse unix, if the target market don't care don't change that fact

[talldayo]

If the Xserve's legacy is anything to go by, neither are UNIX customers.