linuxkit VS lxd

Compare linuxkit vs lxd and see what are their differences.

linuxkit

A toolkit for building secure, portable and lean operating systems for containers (by linuxkit)

lxd

Powerful system container and virtual machine manager [Moved to: https://github.com/canonical/lxd] (by lxc)
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linuxkit lxd
14 29
8,138 3,952
0.7% -
9.1 9.9
3 days ago 10 months ago
Go Go
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

linuxkit

Posts with mentions or reviews of linuxkit. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-18.
  • Gokrazy – Go Appliances
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Dec 2023
    Another project that aims to deliver this is Linuxkit (https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit). All the components they ship are written in memory safe languages (usually Go) and run as containers under containerd. You can build a custom image very easily, fully defined as a YAML file.
  • How to connect to a docker container service when it's running on a mac?
    2 projects | /r/selfhosted | 12 Apr 2023
  • An overview of single-purpose Linux distributions
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Feb 2023
    docker-the-company maintained https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit when I worked there. I have no idea who maintains it now, but it looks like it is still active (presumably still docker-the-company, since their adopters list [1] lists docker desktop).

    [1]: https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit/blob/master/ADOPTERS.md

  • Create a minimalist OS using Docker Containers and Hashicorp Packer
    3 projects | dev.to | 18 Sep 2022
    LF-Edge EVE project leverages Linuxkit to create custom OSs for Edge Devices which in turn leverages Containers as Lego Blocks
  • RootFS Tooling
    6 projects | /r/LinuxNotes | 14 Nov 2021
    LinuxKit - Docker
  • Unpopular opinion: I was promised lightweight containers but I got yet another VM
    1 project | /r/devops | 27 Oct 2021
    Behind the scenes Docker Desktop for Mac spawns a linuxkit VM with a bit of extra stuff like NFS to enable mounting Mac paths into containers. In the Docker Desktop settings you'll find the current resource assignment for that VM. That is pretty much reserved for docker so that it does not have to compete with MacOS processes for available resources.
  • Open source components of Docker for Mac
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Sep 2021
  • What happened to the nice Ansible cloud (provisioning) listing?
    2 projects | /r/ansible | 3 Aug 2021
    That said... you might want to check out linuxkit
  • Ask HN: How are you using unikernels?
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 May 2021
    The definition of what a unikernel is needs to be narrowed down, a lot of these projects in the space (not all the ones listed above) have material differences that are not clear:

    - some run only one language

    - some require recompilation

    - some essentially swap out libraries, others do something closer to dropping your already mostly static binary in a minimal disk image

    - some build pid1 processes, others VMs images

    Anyway, here are some additional entries in the space:

    - https://ssrg-vt.github.io/hermitux/

    - https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit (more embedded/minimal VM than unikernel)

    - https://nabla-containers.github.io/ (runs on Solo5)

    I am going through using Linuxkit to build AMIs for cloud providers now. I wouldn’t necessarily class linuxkit as a universal project because it doesn’t have the hallmark blurring of user and kernel space or kernel-as-a-library but you can customize the kernel so it’s an adjacent idea, and I think it’s the one most likely to be in actual use at non-hyperscalers.

  • Unikraft: Fast, Specialized Unikernels the Easy Way
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Apr 2021
    I believe there is growing interest in providing leaner, "trimmed" runtimes for services deployed to the cloud. Today, this is seen largely by specializing the Linux kernel for, for example, container services[0] or in general[1], as much as that is possible (the paper above covers this problem in greater detail). But, Unikernels in themselves are not yet widely adopted. This is the space Unikraft is aiming to enter, providing the ultimate level of specialization for a target application.

    It's clear that bigger players, such as Red Hat[2] are interested in the topic of unikernels, and that cloud providers are preparing for this future too [3].

    [0]: https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit

lxd

Posts with mentions or reviews of lxd. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-04.
  • LXD is now under Canonical
    1 project | /r/patient_hackernews | 4 Jul 2023
    1 project | /r/hackernews | 4 Jul 2023
    3 projects | /r/LXD | 4 Jul 2023
    The expected changes are: - https://github.com/lxc/lxd will now become https://github.com/canonical/lxd - https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd will disappear and be replaced with a mention directing users to https://ubuntu.com/lxd - The LXD YouTube channel will be handed over to the Canonical team - The LXD section on the LinuxContainers community forum will slowly be sunset in favor of the Ubuntu Discourse forum run by Canonical - The LXD CI infrastructure will be moved under Canonical’s care - Image building for Linux Containers will no longer be relying on systems provided by Canonical, limiting image building to x86_64 and aarch64.
    2 projects | /r/linux | 4 Jul 2023
    1 project | /r/hypeurls | 4 Jul 2023
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jul 2023
  • LXC images download
    1 project | /r/Turris | 4 Jul 2023
    Hello community, it seems LXC images for arm7l/armhf are no longer available, not from the official Turris mirror nor from LinuxContainers.org (https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/). Any solution or alternative for people like me heavily relying on the Turris Omnia to run LXC containers? Thanks.
  • Creating .deb files from the source
    1 project | /r/linux | 2 Jul 2023
  • https://linuxcontainers.org › latest about LXD projects documentation
    1 project | /r/LXD | 25 Apr 2023
  • LXC containers not accessible when Internet is down
    1 project | /r/Proxmox | 20 Apr 2023
    here you go idiot down voters https://github.com/lxc/lxd/issues/10470

What are some alternatives?

When comparing linuxkit and lxd you can also consider the following projects:

nanos - A kernel designed to run one and only one application in a virtualized environment

kata-containers - Kata Containers is an open source project and community working to build a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs. https://katacontainers.io/

unikraft - A next-generation cloud native kernel designed to unlock best-in-class performance, security primitives and efficiency savings.

kubevirt - Kubernetes Virtualization API and runtime in order to define and manage virtual machines.

mirage - MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels

firecracker-container

firecracker-containerd - firecracker-containerd enables containerd to manage containers as Firecracker microVMs

podman-desktop-companion - Podman desktop companion

podman - Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.