Docker builds its own virtualization engine for Desktop, boosting startup speed and memory return
Docker VMM replaces the third-party virtualization components inside Docker Desktop with an engine Docker owns and tunes for container workloads. The payoff: measurably faster container startup, snappier host-container file sharing, and idle containers returning unused memory to the OS. It ships in Docker Desktop 4.86 on macOS automatically and as an opt-in on Windows, with Linux coming at GA — and the same engine now also powers Docker Sandboxes.