Architecture · OrbStack Docs

OrbStack uses a lightweight Linux virtual machine with a shared kernel to minimize overhead and save resources, similar to WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux). This flexible architecture comes with many advantages such as high efficiency, low resource usage, seamless integration with macOS, and more. Vertical integration plays a key role in OrbStack's advantages and seamless integration. All important services have been purpose-built from scratch to work with each other, tailored to the specific needs of OrbStack and its virtual environment, instead of using off-the-shelf programs. Low-level Linux tuning and optimizations are also included to make everything work efficiently. Services are written in a mix of Swift, Go, Rust, and C. The lightweight virtual machine is heavily tuned with both low-level and high-level optimizations to improve performance, save power, and minimize resource usage. This includes novel optimizations built specifically for OrbStack, macOS, and Apple Silicon. We

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