Known issues for Docker Desktop on Mac
-
IPv6 is not (yet) supported on Docker Desktop.
-
On Apple silicon in native
arm64
containers, older versions oflibssl
such asdebian:buster
,ubuntu:20.04
, andcentos:8
will segfault when connected to some TLS servers, for example,curl https://dl.yarnpkg.com
. The bug is fixed in newer versions oflibssl
indebian:bullseye
,ubuntu:21.04
, andfedora:35
. -
The Mac Activity Monitor reports that Docker is using twice the amount of memory than it is actually using. This is due to a bug in MacOS. We have written a detailed report on this.
-
You might encounter errors when using
docker-compose up
with Docker Desktop (ValueError: Extra Data
). We’ve identified this is likely related to data and/or events being passed all at once rather than one by one, so sometimes the data comes back as 2+ objects concatenated and causes an error. -
Force-ejecting the
.dmg
after runningDocker.app
from it can cause the whale icon to become unresponsive, Docker tasks to show as not responding in the Activity Monitor, and for some processes to consume a large amount of CPU resources. Reboot and restart Docker to resolve these issues. -
Docker does not auto-start on login even when it is enabled in Settings. This is related to a set of issues with Docker helper, registration, and versioning.
-
Docker Desktop uses the
HyperKit
hypervisor (https://github.com/docker/hyperkit){:target=”blank” rel=”noopener” class=””} in macOS 10.10 Yosemite and higher. If you are developing with tools that have conflicts withHyperKit
, such as Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM), the current workaround is not to run them at the same time. You can pauseHyperKit
by quitting Docker Desktop temporarily while you work with HAXM. This allows you to continue work with the other tools and preventHyperKit
from interfering. -
If you are working with applications like Apache Maven that expect settings for
DOCKER_HOST
andDOCKER_CERT_PATH
environment variables, specify these to connect to Docker instances through Unix sockets. For example:$ export DOCKER_HOST=unix:///var/run/docker.sock
-
There are a number of issues with the performance of directories bind-mounted into containers. In particular, writes of small blocks, and traversals of large directories are currently slow. Additionally, containers that perform large numbers of directory operations, such as repeated scans of large directory trees, may suffer from poor performance. Applications that behave in this way include:
rake
ember build
- Symfony
- Magento
- Zend Framework
- PHP applications that use Composer to install
dependencies in a
vendor
folder
As a workaround for this behavior, you can put vendor or third-party library directories in Docker volumes, perform temporary file system operations outside of bind mounts, and use third-party tools like Unison or
rsync
to synchronize between container directories and bind-mounted directories. We are actively working on performance improvements using a number of different techniques. To learn more, see the topic on our roadmap.
- Some command line tools do not work when Rosetta 2 is not installed.
- The old version 1.x of
docker-compose
. We recommend that you use Compose V2 instead. Either typedocker compose
or enable the Use Docker Compose V2 option in the General preferences tab. - The
docker scan
command and the underlyingsnyk
binary. - The
docker-credential-ecr-login
credential helper.
- The old version 1.x of
-
Some images do not support the ARM64 architecture. You can add
--platform linux/amd64
to run (or build) an Intel image using emulation.However, attempts to run Intel-based containers on Apple silicon machines under emulation can crash as qemu sometimes fails to run the container. In addition, filesystem change notification APIs (
inotify
) do not work under qemu emulation. Even when the containers do run correctly under emulation, they will be slower and use more memory than the native equivalent.In summary, running Intel-based containers on Arm-based machines should be regarded as “best effort” only. We recommend running arm64 containers on Apple silicon machines whenever possible, and encouraging container authors to produce arm64, or multi-arch, versions of their containers. We expect this issue to become less common over time, as more and more images are rebuilt supporting multiple architectures.
ping
from inside a container to the Internet does not work as expected. To test the network, we recommend usingcurl
orwget
. See docker/for-mac#5322.- Users may occasionally experience data drop when a TCP stream is half-closed.