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I can't seem to find any easily accessible documentation on this, but it sounds like a container is basically an chroot jail: you copy over all the libraries a

I can't seem to find any easily accessible documentation on this, but it sounds like a container is basically an chroot jail: you copy over all the libraries and files into a subdirectory, chroot into it, and run. Am I right? And if so, what took people so long? Chroot has been around for quite a while. The article sort of makes it sound like a lightweight version of containers would be putting everything in its own directory, rather than scattering everything in /usr/lib, /usr/bin, /usr/share, etc. Which is basically macOS' app bundles. I've never understood why other OSes didn't steal that idea. And while I hear a lot of griping about iOS and static libraries, basically what iOS is doing is creating a container, only since they call it an "application bundle" instead of "container" they get all this hate. But... Grandma Tillie (or whoever the user story for Linux on the Desktop back in the The Day was named) can actually figure out how to delete her Mac and iOS apps. Seems like iOS is kind of containers writ large.

abhorrence 9y ago
Chroot is just part of it, there’s also cgroups and namespaces which are more recent.
anonacct37 9y ago
chroot is a filesystem namespace, and containers are basically just that plus some other namespaces. Prior to containers getting really popular I was using debian's schroot project and prior to that I was using solaris zones. There were other similar technologies prior to that but I wasn't really technical or even alive at the time. It's not new. Here's what's made them so popular lately IMO. Docker improved the usability by adding the container registry and adding some better tooling around running a container. Compare installing schroot plus configuring a new container plus running debootstrap plus potentially configuring lvm/btrfs/directory snapshotting to: docker run ubuntu:lts /bin/bash

abhorrence 9y ago

Chroot is just part of it, there’s also cgroups and namespaces which are more recent.

anonacct37 9y ago

chroot is a filesystem namespace, and containers are basically just that plus some other namespaces. Prior to containers getting really popular I was using debian's schroot project and prior to that I was using solaris zones. There were other similar technologies prior to that but I wasn't really technical or even alive at the time. It's not new. Here's what's made them so popular lately IMO. Docker improved the usability by adding the container registry and adding some better tooling around running a container. Compare installing schroot plus configuring a new container plus running debootstrap plus potentially configuring lvm/btrfs/directory snapshotting to: docker run ubuntu:lts /bin/bash