The line that made me sit up isn’t the speed one. It’s Docker saying the same Rust engine runs Docker Sandboxes, their isolated environments for agents and untrusted workloads, and that a VM boundary matters now that developers run AI agents and their generated code locally. Faster starts are the pitch; controlling what crosses the boundary is the reason.
So I’ll flip it on in Docker Desktop settings on the Mac and let Claude-driven builds hammer it — macOS shares the disk, switching back costs nothing. On Windows I wouldn’t bother yet: separate VM, separate disk, push to a registry or rebuild. And if you lean on Rosetta for amd64 images, stay on Apple Virtualization; VMM falls back to QEMU, which is slower.
The story — Docker Desktop 4.86 introduces Docker VMM, Docker’s own virtualization layer, replacing libkrun on macOS and WSL 2 on Windows. Written in Rust against each platform’s native hypervisor interface, it implements only virtio-fs, virtio-net and virtio-balloon, and returns idle RAM via Free Page Reporting. Engine, CLI, API and Compose are unchanged. Beta covers Apple Silicon and Windows x86; general availability with Linux is planned for late October. (Source)