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Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

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Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#11

Post by cookiecaper »

KaiserPro wrote: post #2

for the ignorant, why would I want to wrap docker inside docker?

This is not Docker-in-Docker. This is an OS that acts like a "container hypervisor". It provides the bare minimum for hardware interfacing and hosting containers, just as conventional hypervisor provide the bare minimum for hardware interfacing and hosting virtual machines. The benefit is that more system resources are available for your clients (containers, in this case).

I haven't used RancherOS but CoreOS works mostly-fine. However, I would avoid using these things altogether because containerization sucks.

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#13

Post by gtirloni »

cookiecaper wrote: post #10

CoreOS works the same way. All containers. You can run `toolbox` to get into a systemd-namespace'd Fedora container (any other container can be specified; it's just Fedora by default), from which you're supposed to do all your troubleshooting/analysis (caveat: systemd-namespace does not seem to support `auditd` well). I still strongly dislike "containers". It's not worth the complexity or instability. Two thumbs way…

Could you elaborate on the instability concerns? What kind of workload are you running on containers?

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#14

Post by oneplane »

This is starting to smell like a system on top of a system to fix something that could be fixed in the system. Kind-of like implementing a filesystem on top op a filesystem... or putting a database on a filesystem to run another filesystem inside the database, or using a webbrowser as a runtime instead of an operating system.

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#15

Post by gtrevorjay »

This is clearly a trend, though it remains to see if it will garner enough acceptance to actually be "the future". systemd supports launching container-based services via nspawn and already namespaces "legacy" services very heavily. In fact, systemd et al were among the heaviest early drivers of cgroup technology for cleaner starting and stopping of groups of processes.

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#17

Post by pikzen »

gtrevorjay wrote: post #15

This is clearly a trend, though it remains to see if it will garner enough acceptance to actually be "the future". systemd supports launching container-based services via nspawn and already namespaces "legacy" services very heavily. In fact, systemd et al were among the heaviest early drivers of cgroup technology for cleaner starting and stopping of groups of processes.

Unfortunately, systemd/nspawn does not benefit from the hype Docker garners, despite being infinitely better. This industry is becoming more and more hype and cargo-cult driven, instead of making sane technological choices

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#18

Post by joshwget »

codebeaker wrote: post #3

Didn't Docker release this themselves (different project) just a week or so ago? I forget the name, and can't seem to find it on their site.

There's definitely overlap in functionality between RancherOS and LinuxKit, but there are also a few pretty big differences.

- LinuxKit seems designed to be a piece that can be used to build a Linux distro but isn't a full distro out of the box like RancherOS

- As far as I know LinuxKit is still based on Alpine whereas RancherOS is custom and doesn't have much of a host filesystem

- LinuxKit is based on containerd and RancherOS is still based on Docker (though this is likely to change soon)

We're definitely interested in collaborating with LinuxKit since we do have similar goals. It's probably a good idea for us to write a more detailed blog post comparing the two since we've been getting this question pretty often lately.

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#19

Post by ams6110 »

magoon wrote: post #9
KaiserPro wrote: post #2

for the ignorant, why would I want to wrap docker inside docker?

no, it's the OS services that are dockerized. so your containers won't be docker inside docked.

I still don't see any clear reason for doing this. I mean, "because we can" is interesting in a sort of academic way I guess.

Re: Tiny Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers

#20

Post by frik »

gtrevorjay wrote: post #15

This is clearly a trend, though it remains to see if it will garner enough acceptance to actually be "the future". systemd supports launching container-based services via nspawn and already namespaces "legacy" services very heavily. In fact, systemd et al were among the heaviest early drivers of cgroup technology for cleaner starting and stopping of groups of processes.

I am starting to wonder, why not just execute processes directly with cgroups commands?

  $ cgcreate -g memory,cpu:groupname/foo
  $ cgexec    -g memory,cpu:groupname/foo bash
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/cgroups

It's the bare basic that libvirt and Docker et al are based anyway. So if you want to run just one process per "container" it seems rather logical to keep it simple and use cgroups commands directly. (Similar on Windows, using just sandboxie is so simple. Or do it like Android, execute every app/process with a different user.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroups

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