All articles tagged #container-runtime

There are many ways to create containers, especially on Linux and alike. Besides the super widespread Docker implementation, you may have heard about LXC, systemd-nspawn, or maybe even OpenVZ.

The general concept of the container is quite vague. What's true and what's not often depends on the context, but the context itself isn't always given explicitly. For instance, there is a common saying that containers are Linux processes or that containers aren't Virtual Machines. However, the first statement is just an oversimplified attempt to explain Linux containers. And the second statement simply isn't always true.

In this article, I'm not trying to review all possible ways of creating containers. Instead, the article is an analysis of the OCI Runtime Specification. The spec turned out to be an insightful read! For instance, it gives a definition of the standard container (and no, it's not a process) and sheds some light on when Virtual Machines can be considered containers.

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As we already know, containers are just isolated and restricted Linux processes. We also learned that it's fairly simple to create a container with a single executable file inside starting from scratch image (i.e. without putting a full Linux distribution in there). This time we will go even further and demonstrate that containers don't require images at all. And after that, we will try to justify the actual need for images and their place in the containerverse.

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A container runtime shim is a piece of software that resides in between a container manager (containerd, cri-o, podman) and a container runtime (runc, crun) solving the integration problem of these counterparts.

Layered Docker architecture

The easiest way to spot a shim is to inspect the process tree on a Linux host with a running docker container:

ps auxf output on a host running docker run -it ubuntu bash; notice containerd-shim process in between containerd and bash.

On the one hand, runtimes need shims to be able to survive managers restarts. On the other hand, shims are helping container managers to deal with the quirky behavior of runtimes. As a part of the container manager implementation series, we will try to create our own shim and then integrate it with conman, an experimental container manager. Hopefully, during the development, we will gain an in-depth understanding of the topic.

However, before jumping to the shim development, we need to familiarize ourselves with the container runtime component of the choice. Unsurprisingly, conman uses runc as a container runtime, so I will start the article by covering basic runc use cases alongside its design quirks. Then I'll show the naive way to use runc from code and explain some related pitfalls. The final part of the article will provide an overview of the shim's design.

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With this article, I want to start a series about the implementation of a container manager. What the heck is a container manager? Some prominent examples would be containerd, cri-o, dockerd, and podman. People here and there keep calling them container runtimes, but I would like to reserve the term runtime for a lower-level thingy - the OCI runtime (de facto runc), and a higher-level component controlling multiple such runtime instances I'd like to call a container manager. In general, by a container manager, I mean a piece of software doing a complete container lifecycle management on a single host. In the following series, I will try to guide you myself through the challenge of the creation of yet another container manager. By no means, the implementation is going to be feature-complete, correct or safe to use. The goal is rather to prove the already proven concept. So, mostly for the sake of fun, let the show begin!

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Containers gave birth to more advanced server-side architectures and sophisticated deployment techniques. Containers nowadays are so widespread that there is already a bunch of standard-alike specifications (1, 2, 3, 4, ...) describing different aspects of the containers universe. Of course, on the lowest level lie Linux primitives such as namespaces and cgroups. But containerization software is already so massive that it would be barely possible to implement it without its own concern separation layers. What I'm trying to achieve in this ongoing effort is to guide myself starting from the lowest layers to the topmost ones, having as much practice (code, installation, configuration, integration, etc) and, of course, fun as possible. The content of this page is going to be changing over time, reflecting my understanding of the topic.

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