Show HN: Convert your Containerfile to a bootable OS

The &#x27;bootable container&#x27; &#x2F; &#x27;native container&#x27; space is getting really exiting, even (and especially) for desktop usecases. Atomic Fedora has had support for so called <i>Ostree Native Containers</i> for a while now, and that will eventually adapt `bootc` as the base layer for building and booting containers (but as of now it&#x27;s not totally ready yet). VanillaOS is also working on similar things but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;ll use `bootc`.<p>Some awesome community projects have also been born out of this space:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;universal-blue.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;universal-blue.org&#x2F;</a> provides some neat Fedora images, which have one of the best Nvidia driver experiences on Linux IME, and are over all solid and dependable<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blue-build.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blue-build.org&#x2F;</a> makes it pretty easy to build images like Universal Blue&#x27;s for personal use<p>The best part here is really the composability; you can take a solid atomic Linux base, add whatever you like, and ship it over the air to client computers with container registries. All clients see is a diff every day, which they pull and &#x27;apply&#x27; to be used after the next boot.

I don&#x27;t understand how it works.<p>Did I guess it right that it basically processes Containerfile and instead of producing a .tar artifact (which is what container images usually are) it produces .qcow2&#x2F;.ami&#x2F;.raw&#x2F;.iso&#x2F;.vmdk file which in case of .qcow2&#x2F;.raw&#x2F;.vmdk can be used by a virtualization software to start up a VM with a disk mounted from that file?<p>Will the changes made inside a session with such a VM persist? or will they get lost (which is the default behavior with containers)?<p>Container&#x27;s filesystem may be as narrow as a single binary file, surely a VM with such a filesystem won&#x27;t be able to boot - where will it take the OS (with the kernel, drivers and other stuff) from?

Something like this is what I had desired when briefly experimenting with Fedora CoreOS and having to build layered images for ZFS support. I was new to CoreOS and was stuck right after I finished building an OCI image. Eventually I learned that the only way forward was to boot with a base image, then layer what I had built and run `rpm-ostree commit`.<p>I wonder if this project would&#x27;ve served my use case. The OCI images you build when layering FCOS images all build atop the base FCOS image. So I would expect them to be &quot;bootable&quot; in some sense.

On a tangential note, does anyone here remember Erlang on Xen [0]? It&#x27;s a project from a decade ago, allowing you to package your code to run directly on the hypervisor without an OS. I really liked that approach and am wondering why it seems to have hit a dead end.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cloudozer&#x2F;ling">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cloudozer&#x2F;ling</a>

Keeping an eye on this. I&#x27;ve been wanting something like this to manage an air-gapped system. I don&#x27;t want to worry about keeping on offline apt repository (or what have you) synced, I just want to boot a full new image and mount my home folder.

And we&#x27;ve come full circle almost.

What about the other way around? Writing my own docker(-compose)files by hand kindof stinks.

Somewhat-related, a project of mine (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;queer&#x2F;peckish">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;queer&#x2F;peckish</a>) allows for converting docker images to ext4 images, among other formats. A way to turn it straight to a bootable image is very cool though, I’ll have to give this a try later!

I build Ubuntu OVAs offline using debootstrap-&gt;systemd-nspawn. All you really need to do is install the kernel and initramfs packages, then mount the fs to install grub to it.

I understand this is similar to alpine-make-vm-image [0] or nixos-generators [1]<p>By the way, is there a way to create minimal NixOS VMs without systemd?<p>- [0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alpinelinux&#x2F;alpine-make-vm-image">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alpinelinux&#x2F;alpine-make-vm-image</a> - [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nix-community&#x2F;nixos-generators">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nix-community&#x2F;nixos-generators</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;linka-cloud&#x2F;d2vm">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;linka-cloud&#x2F;d2vm</a> does a similar thing an I‘ve used it successfully

Nice! Same-same-but-different shameless plug: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jrz&#x2F;container-shell">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jrz&#x2F;container-shell</a> boot a shell into your container and mount the working&#x2F;project dir

Is it something similar to d2vm(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;linka-cloud&#x2F;d2vm">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;linka-cloud&#x2F;d2vm</a>)?<p>It would be nice to have my &quot;own&quot; Linux distro.

Really interesting. I&#x27;m guessing this would be used when you want a container experience with VM level security. Would hopefully make it easier to create bespoke VM images to do fun stuff.

I wonder as an experiment if you are able to run an instance of the parent OS via mounting &#x2F;:&#x2F; and using an image that matches the parent OS…

What is a practical example of how this is useful?

Looks interesting, any Proxmox support or tests were done? I would love to see how this compares to a docker in LXC and having one for each container.

Guix did that too, right?

Excellent, now I can write docker files to run containers as VMs on FreeBSD!

That&#x27;s cool! Can you use it to display react apps on the screen though?