RH Summit: Frontiers in Image-based Linux

General
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A few days ago I joined Colin Walters at the Red Hat Summit in Denver, CO, USA to talk about all of this stuff.

The idea was for me to cover the history of Universal Blue while Colin covered the technical details of rpm-ostree and bootc. Unfortunately the talk was not recorded, so here are the slides, I went first and then Colin talked a bit about where they want to take all this stuff.

Overall it was pretty awesome, we were swamped with questions at the end (I didn’t even get to see the workshop part at the end with Tiffany and Andy since I had to leave the room to field questions from folks.)

Slides

Image-based Linux, an approach to deploying and maintaining Linux distributions in which the entire operating system is composed into a single image, is gaining popularity in use cases from the desktop to the edge to the data center. In this set of sessions, we’ll highlight the projects and community efforts powering current and future image-based Linux solutions, with a focus on projects in the Fedora and CentOS ecosystem.

We’ll showcase Universal Blue, a community-built image-based operating system based on Fedora. We’ll also dive into bootc, an exciting new project that allows you to boot and upgrade entire operating systems with container images. To wrap up, you’re invited to share your thoughts on the day’s topics by participating in interactive (and fun!) activities led by Red Hat’s User Experience team.

Speakers will include Red Hat Senior Principal Software Engineer and inventor of OSTree, Colin Walters, the CNCF’s Jorge Castro, and UX Designers, Andy Burka and Tiffany Nolan.

  • Colin Walters, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat
  • Jorge Castro, Open Source Community Manager, Cloud Native Computing > Foundation
  • Tiffany Nolan, Principal Interaction Designer, Red Hat
  • Andy Burka, Sr. Interaction Designer, Red Hat

More info

3 Likes
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Really sad this wasn’t recorded, but at least the slides are sick :+1:

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Awesome! And I’m excited for what comes with bootc too.

Will bootc impact the the current UBlue image build processes? And if so, what are the expected timelines to update the current pipelines?

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Can’t guarantee everything but planning on doing it as fast as possible. On paper this should allow us to remove a bunch of workarounds and cruft that we’ve built up. Check the example in the slides on replacing the kernel as an example.

1 Like
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Can you (or someone) give a high level description of the differences between bootc and the rest? I have used Linux nearly my entire career but until I tried ZFSBootMenu I had no reason to get into the internals of boot initialization let alone how it it works in a containerized kernel. I mean I googled but some key points would be really valuable.

Also from a marketing perspective this came from the failed attempts at auto-driving cars that needed a unified OS with the same security as discrete components right? Might be good to highlight that :smiley: … they’re one of the more security industries I’ve worked with.