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bluefin-vm

This project is a convenience wrapper that turns an upstream Bluefin bootc container into a running Linux VM on Apple Silicon with one command.

It delivers a provisioned desktop, no ISO, no installer, no greeter to click through.

Performance

An aarch64 guest under Apple's Virtualisation framework (via Tart) runs at near-native speed. Full-screened, it is hard to tell from a bare metal install.

On an M3 Air, up reaches a provisioned desktop in under three minutes. Later runs take about as long as a desktop takes to boot, because the disk is cached on the first one.

Status

Experimental. This is a semver versioned proof-of-concept, beta release. The pipeline runs end-to-end, the runtime is Tart, and the tool ships via a personal Homebrew tap.

Planned

Not built yet:

  • Flavours
    • pick a Bluefin variant (e.g. bluefin-dx) as the base; each is just a different upstream image.
  • Host key integration
    • use your host ssh keys / YubiKey from inside the guest via agent forwarding, no secrets copied in.
  • Suspend / resume
    • pause keeping the in-RAM session (waiting on Tart's Linux-guest support).