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To filter out some of the buzz words: It's a new minimal Linux distro designed to run containers, with a build system that supports various image outputs (VMDK,

by jdub 10y ago

To filter out some of the buzz words: It's a new minimal Linux distro designed to run containers, with a build system that supports various image outputs (VMDK, ISO, cloud images, etc). The "packages" are Docker images. It's pretty easy to configure and build your own images with… you guessed it… YAML. Very much in the same ball park as Rancher, CoreOS, Atomic, etc. (It's essentially a rebrand, rethink, and projectisation of "Moby", the distro that ships with Docker for Mac/Windows. Meanwhile, Moby has become the open source project around Docker or something... like Fedora / Red Hat.)

mintplant 10y ago
If this is a "distro", is it correct to assume that it would run in a VM on the host system?
- xahrepap 10y ago
  Yes. You use the new Moby to build your own distro using a yaml file and you can choose to use LinuxKit as the base. Then you can install additional items on top of it and it outputs various images types: IMG, iso, Google cloud images, etc.
- jdub 10y ago
  Yes. Or, as they mention, on metal. Though I imagine they're focused on being a good guest OS for the moment. :-)
  - justincormack 10y ago
    We have packet.net support that we are planning to use for CI (and they have been very helpful), and some more bare metal in progress (HPE will demo bare metal later today). But yes, we started with VMs, as all the Docker Editions were VM based.
philips 10y ago
As the name suggests LinuxKit is more of a developer kit than an end-user product like CoreOS Container Linux, Rancher or Atomic. Importantly updates are not handled by LinuxKit itself[1] but the concept is that that a higher level system or packager might take care of via CloudFormation and an out-of-band re-provisioning method. It is obviously early days for the LinuxKit project and we will see how it goes. Overall, though I think there is a lot of interest in packaging up system level services inside of containers and I applaud the effort to keep exploring these ideas. - CoreOS Container Linux has been continually pushing as many services into docker image containers including etcd, kubelet, etc. https://coreos.com/blog/introducing-the-kubelet-in-coreos.html https://coreos.com/blog/introducing-the-kubelet-in-coreos.ht... - Systemd community has been exploring portable services https://lwn.net/Articles/706025/ https://lwn.net/Articles/706025/ - RancherOS runs as much as possible underneath the Docker Engine and packages up services in docker images - The Linux Desktop folks at Red Hat have been exploring ideas like http://flatpak.org/ http://flatpak.org/ [1] https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit/blob/master/docs/faq.md#how-do-updates-work https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit/blob/master/docs/faq.md...
- bigmac 10y ago
  Importantly updates are not handled by LinuxKit itself[1] but the concept is that that a higher level system or packager might take care of via CloudFormation and an out-of-band re-provisioning method. This was an explicit omission, at least for now. We left update out of scope because it's better handled by the infrastructure provisioning system (in our case, infrakit). We'll use infrakit to supply updates (and the dm-verity hash, for that matter). Thus we treat infrastructure provisioning system as the trusted 'bootloader' for a cluster of machines. Most datacenter clusters end up having an infrastructure provisioning system, so it makes more sense for those systems to have the OS update responsibility. This ends up meaning less attack surface on the host itself, and serves as a good separation of concerns and least privilege design.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- evand 9y ago
  There's also snapcraft: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLxqdf89hRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLxqdf89hRo - https://snapcraft.io https://snapcraft.io

by jdub 10y ago

mintplant 10y ago

If this is a "distro", is it correct to assume that it would run in a VM on the host system?

xahrepap 10y ago
Yes. You use the new Moby to build your own distro using a yaml file and you can choose to use LinuxKit as the base. Then you can install additional items on top of it and it outputs various images types: IMG, iso, Google cloud images, etc.
jdub 10y ago
Yes. Or, as they mention, on metal. Though I imagine they're focused on being a good guest OS for the moment. :-)
- justincormack 10y ago
  We have packet.net support that we are planning to use for CI (and they have been very helpful), and some more bare metal in progress (HPE will demo bare metal later today). But yes, we started with VMs, as all the Docker Editions were VM based.

philips 10y ago

As the name suggests LinuxKit is more of a developer kit than an end-user product like CoreOS Container Linux, Rancher or Atomic. Importantly updates are not handled by LinuxKit itself[1] but the concept is that that a higher level system or packager might take care of via CloudFormation and an out-of-band re-provisioning method. It is obviously early days for the LinuxKit project and we will see how it goes. Overall, though I think there is a lot of interest in packaging up system level services inside of containers and I applaud the effort to keep exploring these ideas. - CoreOS Container Linux has been continually pushing as many services into docker image containers including etcd, kubelet, etc. https://coreos.com/blog/introducing-the-kubelet-in-coreos.html https://coreos.com/blog/introducing-the-kubelet-in-coreos.ht... - Systemd community has been exploring portable services https://lwn.net/Articles/706025/ https://lwn.net/Articles/706025/ - RancherOS runs as much as possible underneath the Docker Engine and packages up services in docker images - The Linux Desktop folks at Red Hat have been exploring ideas like http://flatpak.org/ http://flatpak.org/ [1] https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit/blob/master/docs/faq.md#how-do-updates-work https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit/blob/master/docs/faq.md...

bigmac 10y ago
Importantly updates are not handled by LinuxKit itself[1] but the concept is that that a higher level system or packager might take care of via CloudFormation and an out-of-band re-provisioning method. This was an explicit omission, at least for now. We left update out of scope because it's better handled by the infrastructure provisioning system (in our case, infrakit). We'll use infrakit to supply updates (and the dm-verity hash, for that matter). Thus we treat infrastructure provisioning system as the trusted 'bootloader' for a cluster of machines. Most datacenter clusters end up having an infrastructure provisioning system, so it makes more sense for those systems to have the OS update responsibility. This ends up meaning less attack surface on the host itself, and serves as a good separation of concerns and least privilege design.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
evand 9y ago
There's also snapcraft: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLxqdf89hRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLxqdf89hRo - https://snapcraft.io https://snapcraft.io