Anshul Patel

What is LinuxKit

● Toolkit for building secure, portable & lean operating system for containers.

● Built with containers, for running containers.

● All Operating system services are containers.

● Operating system services are pluggable.

● Operating system is built using Moby tool.

Purpose of LinuxKit

● Creates Immutable Operating Systems.

● Provides Declarative way for creating Operating Systems.

● Build the whole system in CI pipeline which guarantees reproducible builds &

reliability.

● Suitable for Cloud, VMs and Bare-Metals.

LinuxKit YAML config file

● Kernel - Specifies Kernel Image version and parameters

● Init - Components which will be part of initrd

● Onboot - One-off containers executed during boot. They get terminated after

execution

● Services - Long running process which will serve the incoming requests.

● Files - Copy local files to Operating System

● Trust - Components which are required to be cryptographically verified with

Docker Content Trust.

Outputs: ISOs, RAW, VMDK, VHD, etc

Example

Security

● Include only components which are required.

● Provides Ability to use latest Kernel.

● Containerized Operating System services, hence minimal privileges.

● Smaller attack surface.

● Immutable Infrastructure, only namespaced container data and stateful

partitions can be modified.

Support

Best Supported

● Hyperkit, VMware(Pro), Qemu/KVM

● GCE, Packet.net

In Progress

● AWS, Azure, Windows, BlueMix

Planned

● ARM

Demo

Ongoing/Future Developments

● Rewrite in type safe languages such as Rust.

● Blueprints/Samples for different platforms.

● Improve APIs.

● Integration with Infrakit to run cluster of instances running Kubernetes/Swarm.

● Integration with other orchestration tools like VMware VCloud Director,

Terraform.

Questions?

Thank You!