People talk about “Linux containers” forgetting that the part actually called “Linux”, the kernel, isn’t in the container.

But what if you could include a kernel in your container image, and what if you could boot that image? What if you could commit the definition of your whole Linux system to version control. What if you could push around images for the entire system, just like you can with containers. And finally: what if this was a documented and tested first class workflow supported by your Linux OS/distribution?

Let’s take the practices, tooling and standards that have grown around OCI containers for applications and apply them to the operating system. Let’s deploy and update the host via those same patterns, rather than individual fine grained packages. As we emphasize derived, consumer-owned builds, let’s make it ergonomic to create and maintain a complete trust chain all the way from the boot loader through the OS right through to existing containerized apps. Let’s bring immutability, auto-updating, resetting along as well.

We’d like to show how this can work practically, with real world applications, and built out of the packages we have today. We’ll look at the projects that are working on various parts of this puzzle.

There’ll be demos, there’ll be prizes, there’ll be cheers, there’ll be tears. This work has gotten us excited about the operating system again, and we’d love to share it with you.

This is a BOF where we discuss all that is new in the container world. Containerized OS, Bootc, Podman, Podman Desktop, Buildah, CRI-O ...