distrobuilder VS containerd

LXC

which is what docker/podman/containerd use. If you want full system emulation look into LXC/LXD.

LXD is a manager for Linux Containers (LXC), which lets me spin up a kind-of lightweight VM for any distro, instantly. I use it to run proprietary software isolated from the rest of my system (such as Steam); disposable environments for trying stuff out, and running software that doesn't jive well with Nixos.

Check this thread on linuxcontainers LXD forum. Half way down Simos points to the eventual solution:

I found this website https://linuxcontainers.org/ and I am going to test that out for server just to see how it works.

Up to now the best documentation I have come across is the official one at linuxcontainers.org.

Containers, like LXC or Docker.

After five years managing physical servers, then another four years working with VM clusters, the value of Linux Containers(LXC) and their eventual productization as Docker appealed to me.

Docker introduced container images to the technology world, making container images a standardized delivery unit. In fact, before Docker, containerization technology already existed. Let's talk about a more recent technology, LXC (Linux Containers) in 2008. Compared to Docker, LXC is less popular since Docker provides container images, which can be more standardized and more convenient to migrate. Also, Docker created the DockerHub public service, which has become the world's largest container image repository. In addition, containerization technology can also achieve a certain degree of resource isolation, including not only CPU, memory, and other resources isolation, but also network stack isolation, which makes it easier to deploy multiple copies of applications on the same machine.

Containerd and nerdctl

Kubernetes on the backend used to utilize docker for much of its container runtime solutions. One of the modular features of Kubernetes is the ability to utilize a Container Runtime Interface or CRI. The problem was that Docker didn't really meet the spec properly and they had to maintain a shim to translate properly. Instead users could utilize the popular containerd or cri-o runtimes. These follow the Open Container Initiative or OCI's guidelines on container formats.

Container Engine: A runtime that executes and manages containers. Docker and containerd are popular container engines.

Multiple container runtimes are supported, like conatinerd, cri-o, or other CRI compliant runtimes.

This is a failed attempt to upstream part of containerd changes: https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/8789

Other part of containerd changes waits for gods-know-what: https://github.com/containerd/containerd/pull/9054

But I haven't gave up yet.

containerd is required by kubernetes to handle containers on its behalf. A big thanks to the HostAfrica blog for the information on setting containerd up for debain. So the containerd install will need to happen on both the WSL2 instance and the Raspberry Pis. For WSL2 you can just install containerd directly:

The context deadline exceeded: unknown is also in containerd, and is a known problem.

Get:1 https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu focal/stable amd64 containerd.io amd64 1.6.21-1 [28.3 MB]

Docker Desktop adds a bunch of stuff to simplify local development and that’s why it has a larger memory footprint. You don’t use that when deploying but something like https://containerd.io/.