Reproduction of eBPF/XDP Applications on macOS with Colima, Docker blogpost,
with Apple's native container CLI in place of Colima + Docker, plus a custom kernel
that restores the features Apple's stock VM kernel leaves out.
Host: Apple M4, macOS 27.0 (build 26A5406e), container 1.3.0, kernel 6.18.15 aarch64.
eBPF and XDP are increasingly used for network traffic filtering, observability, abuse protection, and performing extremely cheap packet inspections before traffic reaches the regular Linux networking stack.
There is one practical problem, though: if your primary workstation is a Mac — especially an Apple Silicon Mac — you cannot build and test Linux eBPF programs exactly the same way you build a normal Go application.
For a reproducible build environment, we need:
bpf2go
When you need to run a one-off task in the background or schedule a maintenance script for later, the usual tools that come to mind are nohup, screen, at, or cron.
But if your servers already use systemd, you also have access to a much more powerful tool: systemd-run.
It creates transient units — temporary services and timers that do not require permanent .service or .timer files.
With transient units, you can get proper process supervision, journald logging, cgroup resource limits, sandboxing, scheduling, and status tracking without adding permanent systemd configuration.
Let’s look at a few practical use cases.
In short, the systemd-resolved service is a system service that provides network name resolution to local applications. It implements a caching DNS stub resolver and an LLMNR resolver and responder.
See the official documentation for more information.