Operating system images with bootc

Production Line

Podman Desktop

The Podman Desktop graphical front end is an alternative to the build process in a terminal. The tool provides a bootc extension and then automatically takes care of generating a new bootable container image for you. To do so, press the Build button and then simply select the desired bootc base image from the pull-down menu along with the desired image format. The tool then automatically launches the Image Builder Service in a container and creates the new image there.

Of course, you can also adapt the bootc base image to your own requirements up front before you create a bootable disk image from it. This example,

FROM quay.io/centos-bootc/centos-bootc:stream9
RUN dnf -y install httpd && systemctl enable httpd && mv /var/www /usr/share/www && sed -ie 's,/var/www,/usr/share/www,' /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
RUN rm -rf /usr/share/httpd/noindex
COPY index.html /usr/share/www/html
EXPOSE 80

sets up a simple container file for running a web server in a bootc container.

Conclusions

Container images for apps are nothing new, but what about bootable operating systems? Armed with bootc container images and a little help from the bootc Image Builder service, you can quickly create bootable container images for your choice of operating system. You can then use your container-based workflow for both your applications and your operating systems. You will find more information about this new deployment method for operating systems on Red Hat's image mode page [4].

Infos

bootc: https://github.com/containers/bootc
bootc Image Builder: https://github.com/osbuild/bootc-image-builder
Podman Desktop: https://podman-desktop.io
RHEL image mode: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux/image-mode

The Author

Thorsten Scherf is the global Product Lead for Identity Management and Platform Security in Red Hat's Product Operations group. He is a regular speaker at various international conferences and writes a lot about open source software.

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