DevConf.CZ

Customize your operating system like a container or start a new project without building a new distribution
2024-06-14 , E112 (capacity 156)

Fedora offers a set of variants that are image based systems: Fedora CoreOS, IoT, Atomic Desktops (https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/). They provide atomic and reliable upgrades and let you run applications in containers or Flatpaks.

But sometimes, you still need to change what is in the image to add support for your hardware using out of tree kernel modules, install a security agent for compliance or fix a bug. So how do you customize the system when it is offered as a read only image?

To solve this use-case, we are turning the distribution into a container, to build and distribute OS images. Anyone will be able to modify the Fedora images to include their own packages, configuration files and changes and then distribute that to their systems, using any container tools or registries.

This is how the Universal Blue (https://universal-blue.org), Project Bluefin (https://projectbluefin.io/), Bazzite (https://bazzite.gg/) and related projects are successfully building on top of Fedora Atomic Desktops without having to create a completely new Linux distribution in the process.

In this talk we will give examples of how this works with Fedora CoreOS and Fedora Atomic Desktops.

See also:

Timothée Ravier is a Linux system and security engineer interested in safe programming languages and container focused operating systems. He is currently working at Red Hat as a CoreOS engineer. He maintains Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite, which are variants of Fedora focused on containers and Flatpaks. He is a KDE developer and helps maintain KDE Applications as Flatpaks on Flathub.

Red Hat developper working on Fedora CoreOS and Red Hat Core OS (the underlying OS for Openshift Container Platform)

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