nerdctl VS podman

Direct use of containerd? containerd? turns out I didn't know anything about container technology. containerd was originally developed by Docker in 2015 as a daemon that provided basic container management capabilities under Docker. containerd's scope has gradually expanded and now seems to cover almost everything in the Docker Engine. For example, nerdctl is a CLI for containerd; the UX is almost identical to the Docker CLI, and Docker Compose is also supported (nerdctl compose).

Nerdctl[1] (for containerd) works fine with docker-compose.yml for my purposes (which are not much). The only issue I encountered was with environment variable substitution not working the same as docker-compose, but I didn't look hard for a solution and edited my compose file

1. https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl mine came bundled with Rancher desktop, and 'nerdctl compose up' is all I've needed

I haven't tried it personally but you might be able to export the tar from docker host with docker cli and then load it on containerd host using nerdctl - https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl

It looks like the real nice thing here is having a formula for QEMU with the ARM patch applied: https://github.com/simnalamburt/qemu/tree/hvf

With this I believe you could also used [nerd](https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl) instead of podman but I haven't tested it yet.

One area, where containerd didn't had a first class support was CLI. the default containerd CLI "ctr" has a very naive implementation. The reason for that I believe is, containerd as a system was never meant to be consumed by humans, and was designed to be consumed by higher layers e.g. orchestration systems like nomad or k8s. However, with the deprecation of dockershim in k8s, and users moving to containerd, a new docker compatible CLI came out:

https://github.com/AkihiroSuda/nerdctl

If you just have containerd running on your system (with no docker daemon running), you can just install nerdctl and add

alias docker="nerdctl"

to your ~/.bashrc file.

Then you can just run any docker commands the way you used to with docker, and it will run those commands against the containerd API giving you the same CLI experience that you used to have with docker.

Thus motivated, install Podman Desktop, a Docker-compatible Linux containers tool with Podman. After Podman Desktop is installed and running, open a terminal and

What makes containers useful is the tooling that surrounds it. For these labs, we will be using Docker, which has been a widely adopted tool for using containers to build applications. Docker provides developers and operators with a friendly interface to build, ship and run containers on any environment with a Docker engine. Because Docker client requires a Docker engine, an alternative is to use Podman, which is a deamonless container engine to develop, manage and run OCI containers and is able to run containers as root or in rootless mode. For those reasons, we recommend Podman but because of adoption, this lab still uses Docker.

Podman (Pod Manager) is probably one of the most famous alternatives to Docker Desktop. It's an open-source container management tool that offers a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI containers on Linux systems.

containers/podman > [Feature]: Android support:

> There are docker and containerd in termux-packages. https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/tree/master/root-p...

But Android 13+ supports rootless pKVM VMs, which podman-machine should be able to run containers in; but only APK-installed binaries are blessed with the necessary extended filesystem attributes to exec on Android 4.4+ with SELinux in enforcing mode.

- Android pKVM: https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/architec... :

> qemu + pKVM + podman-machine: https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/17717 :

> The protected kernel-based virtual machine (pKVM) is built upon the Linux KVM hypervisor, which has been extended with the ability to restrict access to the payloads running in guest virtual machines marked ‘protected’ at the time of creation.

> KVM/arm64 supports different execution modes depending on the availability of certain CPU features, namely, the Virtualization Host Extensions (VHE) (ARMv8.1 and later).

- "Android 13 virtualization lets [Pixel >= 6] run Windows 11, Linux distributions" (2022)

Given access to the server, I had no idea where to start or even what I was looking for. There was tech I had never worked with before like an Nginx server and podman which is similar to Docker (the only technology I am familiar with) and can work in tandem with it. There was a lot of work to be done and I lot I didn't understand so I got creative.

Podman is an open-source visualization tool developed by RedHat. It leverages the libpod library as a container lifecycle management tool. It is a daemonless container engine OCI management on Linux. It is primarily made for Linux but can run on Windows and Mac using virtual machines managed by Podman.

A lot of well-known Docker alternatives emerged at this point, the most commonly recommended of which must be Podman (along with Podman Desktop). This is what I use on my Windows machines, and this was the first solution that I tried on the Macbook as well.