If you’re an Apple user, you may have heard of Apple’s upcoming feature Containerization during WWDC 2025.
Quick summary:

Container is a CLI tool, which works with Containerization. This is what end-users interact with.
Containerization handles creating the containers, that talks to Virtualization.framework.
Virtualization.framework is the hypervisor API (high level), and creates a new VM per container via Hypervisor.framework.
Hypervisor.framework is the low level hypervisor API, which uses the macOS kernel (the hypervisor).

It is similar to Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL), where a very small lightweight virtual machine (VM) is launched in the background, so a Linux kernel can be used on a non Linux host (WSL2 uses Hyper-V). Not to be confused with WSL1, which was more like WINE!

Kali Linux

Apple's new Containerization feature for macOS allows running Linux containers natively through a lightweight VM approach similar to WSL2. The Container CLI tool works with OCI-compliant images including Kali Linux containers. Setup involves installing the Container tool via Homebrew or manual download, starting the system service, and installing a default kernel. Users can run Kali containers with familiar Docker-like commands, mount volumes, and create aliases for convenience. Current limitations include network connectivity issues on macOS Sequoia 15.

Kali Linux & Containerization (Apple's Container)