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Never head of Sysbox before. At a first glance, the comparison table in their GitHub repo and on their website[1] has a number of inaccuracies which makes me qu
by lima 5y ago
Never head of Sysbox before. At a first glance, the comparison table in their GitHub repo and on their website[1] has a number of inaccuracies which makes me question the quality of their engineering:
— They claim that their solution has the same isolation level ("4 stars") than gVisor, unlike "standard containers", which are "2 stars" only (with Firecracker and Kubevirt being "5 stars). This is very wrong - as far as I can tell, they use regular Linux namespaces with some light eBPF-based filesystem emulation, while the vast majority of syscalls is still handled by the host kernel. Sorry, but this is still "2 stars" and far away from the isolation guarantees provided by gVisor (fully emulating the kernel in userspace, which is at the same level or even better than Firecracker) and nowhere close to a VM.
— Somehow, regular VMs (Kubevirt) get a "speed" rating of only "2 stars" - worse than gVisor ("3 stars") and Firecracker ("4 stars"), even though they both rely on virtually the same virtualization technology. If anything, gVisor is the slowest but most efficient solution while QEMU maintains some performance advantage over Firecracker[2]. These are basically random scores, it's not a good first impression–if you do a detailed comparison like that, at least do a proper evaluation before giving your own product the best score!
— They claim that "standard containers" cannot run a full OS. This isn't true - while it's typically a bad idea, this works just fine with rootless podman and, more recently, rootless docker. Allowing this is the whole point of user namespaces, after all! Maybe their custom procfs does a better job of pretending to be a VM - but it's simply false that you can't do these things without. You can certainly run a full OS inside Kata/Firecracker, too, I've actually done that.
Nitpicking over rating scales aside, the claim that their solution offers large security improvements over any other solution with user namespaces isn't true and the whole thing seems very marketing-driven. The isolation offered by user namespaces is still very weak and not comparable to gVisor or Firecracker (both in production use by Google/AWS for untrusted workloads!). False marketing is a big red flag, especially for something as critical as a container runtime.
Anyone who wants unprivileged system containers might want to look into rootless docker or podman rather than this.
[1]: https://www.nestybox.com https://www.nestybox.com
[2]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi20-paper-agache.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi20-paper-agache.pdf
- lox 5y agoI don't spend a lot of time on those comparison-style charts if I'm honest, but that is good (and valid) feedback for them. I also hadn't heard of it, I discovered sysbox via jpettazo's updated post at https://jpetazzo.github.io/2015/09/03/do-not-use-docker-in-docker-for-ci/ https://jpetazzo.github.io/2015/09/03/do-not-use-docker-in-d..., he's an advisor of nestybox the company that develops sysbox. For the CI/CD usecase on AWS, sysbox presented the right balance of trade-offs between something like Firecracker (which would require bare metal hosts on AWS) and the docker containers that already existed. We specifically need to run privileged containers so that we could run docker-in-docker for CI workloads, so rootless docker or podman wouldn't have helped. Sysbox lets us do that with a significant improvement in security to just running privileged docker containers as most CI environments end up doing. Just switching their docker-in-docker CI job containers to sysbox would have mitigated 4 of the compromises from the article with nearly zero other configuration changes.
- lima 5y ago> We specifically need to run privileged containers so that we could run docker-in-docker for CI workloads, so rootless docker or podman wouldn't have helped. rootless docker works inside an unprivileged container (that's how our CI works).
- HenAm 5y agoHow do you run rootless docker in unprivileged container ? Here it says that the privilege is still a must. https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/rootless/#rootless-docker-in-docker https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/rootless/#rootless-d...
- pritambaral 5y ago> They claim that "standard containers" cannot run a full OS. ... this works just fine with rootless podman and, more recently, rootless docker. > Anyone who wants unprivileged system containers might want to look into rootless docker or podman rather than this. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I have been running full OS userlands using "standard containers" in production for years, via LXD[1]. [1]: https://linuxcontainers.org/ https://linuxcontainers.org/