dinker VS mkosi

(Self plug) I had the same thoughts as the author, and made this: https://github.com/andrewbaxter/dinker . Like stated in the article, if you're doing rust or go all you want is to dump the binary in the image. There's no reason to do the build inside the docker vm in that case, and it's super fast, and only uses dumb filesystem access - no daemons like docker, weird wip container managers like buildah, etc.

Self hoisting here, I put this together to make it easier to generate single (extra) layer docker images without needing a docker agent, capabilities, chroot, etc: https://github.com/andrewbaxter/dinker

Caveat: it doesn't work on Fly.io. They seem to be having some issue with OCI manifests: https://github.com/containers/skopeo/issues/1881 . They're also having issues with new docker versions pushing from CI: https://community.fly.io/t/deploying-to-fly-via-github-actio... ... the timing of this post seems weird.

FWIW the article says

> create a Docker image, also known as an OCI image

I don't think this is quite right. From my investigation, Docker and OCI images are basically content addressed trees, starting with a root manifest that points to other files and their hashes (root -> images -> layers -> layer configs + files). The OCI manifests and configs are separate to Docker manifests and configs and basically Docker will support both side by side.

I work with a free and open-source software community called Fedora Project. I had the opportunity to moderate the talk of one of the maintainers of the Systemd suite during the annual contributor conference, Flock To Fedora 2023 where he talked about a tool named Mkosi.

For testing i prefer systemd-nspawn containers with mkosi. A neat tool for running your other fav. distro in a terminal. Works like a charm and integrates nicely in your system. Eg. logs and systemd services or CI testing.

- https://github.com/systemd/mkosi

- man:systemd-nspawn(1)

- man:machinectl(1)

you're gonna have to build this on an x86 pc. sudo dnf install arch-install-scripts bubblewrap gdisk qemu-user-static rsync systemd-container python3 -m pip install --user git+https://github.com/systemd/mkosi.git git clone https://github.com/leifliddy/asahi-fedora-usb.git cd asahi-fedora-usb

There's also mkosi: https://github.com/systemd/mkosi. This one outputs an iso or similar image file and supports many base distributions.

[1] https://github.com/systemd/mkosi/issues/376

System's mkosi is worth checking out too: https://github.com/systemd/mkosi I don't think it generates docker/OCI images directly, but it definitely can generate a tarball of the final image contents and then crane of a similar tool could package it up into an appropriate image. For just docker usage it's probably overkill, the main advantage would be it can build other image types like adding a kernel and init to be a fully bootable iso of VM image.

Constellation ensures that all K8s nodes run on AMD-based Confidential VMs (CVMs). CVMs are strongly isolated from the host and remain encrypted in memory at runtime. Constellation also ensures that all nodes run the same minimal mkosi-based node image.

At first glance I thought your project is a frontend for mkosi but then I saw that you support non-systemd targets too. Mentioning it here because it may be relevant to other users/developers.