The status of docker

[John Nielsen]

> On Jan 23, 2019, at 11:26 AM, John Nielsen <lists at jnielsen.net> wrote:
> 
>> On Jan 22, 2019, at 11:54 PM, Sergey Zakharchenko <doublef.mobile at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello there guys,
>> 
>>> Not quite. I took over the docker freebsd port. Currently I am trying to
>>> change him to moby project on GH.
>> 
>> Jochen, I wish you the best of luck. As a couple of cents, and on
>> behalf of Digital Loggers, Inc., I've uploaded some old patches that
>> we use to run an ancient version of Docker on FreeBSD:
>> https://github.com/digitalloggers/docker-zfs-patches . They speed up
>> building of large containers by not iterating over all container files
>> at every single stage, using ZFS diffs instead. No warranty, express
>> or implied, is provided on those patches; I'm sure you'll find some
>> edge cases where they'll break your container builds; you have been
>> warned. Also, forgive my Go: that was the first and hopefully the last
>> time I wrote something in it.
>> 
>> That's not much; the real problems are with volume (e.g. single-file
>> "volumes" which are hard links) and networking support; they were
>> solved (kind of) by us by dynamically generating Dockerfiles and
>> adding container startup wrappers, to the point that most would say
>> it's too mutilated to be named Docker, so I'm afraid we aren't sharing
>> those for the time being.
>> 
>> My answers to why on earth one would run Docker under FreeBSD instead
>> of using plain (or wrapped in yet another wrapper unknown to
>> non-FreeBSD) jails would be uniformity, simplicity, skill reuse, etc.
>> of quite a broad range of operations. However, Docker/Moby is really
>> too tied to Linux; there seem to be random attempts at overcoming that
>> but they don't receive enough mind share. Jetpack
>> (https://github.com/3ofcoins/jetpack/) could probably also benefit
>> from the patches (with appropriate adjustments). Interested people
>> willing to invest time in this should gather and decide how to move
>> on.
> 
> Responding to a random message to share a random-ish thought: has anyone looked at Firecracker?
> 
> https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/
> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-virtualization-for-serverless-computing/
> 
> It's the now-open-source basis of AWS's Fargate service. The idea is to be more secure and flexible than Docker for Kubernetes-like workloads. Linux-only at the moment I'm sure but I don't see any reason that FreeBSD couldn't run inside a Firecracker microVM (using a stripped-down kernel with virtio_blk, if_vtnet, uart and either atkbdc or a custom driver for the 1-button keyboard. It's also feasible that FreeBSD could be a Firecracker host (and able to unmodified pre-packaged Linux or other microVMs) if someone with the right Go skills wanted to port the KVM bits to use VMM/bhyve.

S/Go/Rust