mkosi VS nixery

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.

The ones from https://nixery.dev/

You can build your own with https://nixery.dev/

I built a service for doing this ad-hoc via image names a few years ago and it enjoys some popularity with CI & debugging use-cases: https://nixery.dev/

name is eerily similar to `nixpkgs`, i.e. the monorepo that defines all packages and one of the underlying technologies here. i get the play on buildpacks, but still, as a nix user it makes me do a double take reading the name

this is neat though, and in political terms, the elevator pitch mentions nix itself as an implementation detail in passing. hopefully, if this catches on, it'll function as a non-threatening gateway drug to nix itself, when users inevitably go digging into the weeds

for anyone interested, prior art on the nix container front: https://nixery.dev

Wow, this is excellent! At a previous job, we had been using k8s + knative to spin up containers on demand, and likewise were unhappy with the delays. Spawner seems excellent.

One question: have you had to do any custom container builds on demand, and if so, have you had to deal with large containers (e.g. a Python base image with a few larger packages installed from PyPI)? We would run up against extremely long build image times using tools like kaniko, and caching would typically have only a limited benefit.

I was experimenting using Nix to maybe solve some of these problems, but never got far enough to run a speed test, and then left the job before finishing. But it seems to me some sort of algorithm like Nixery uses (https://nixery.dev) to generate cacheable layers with completely repeatable builds and nothing extraneous would help.

Maybe that's not a problem you had to solve, but if it is, I'd love your thoughts.

Nixery – Docker images on the fly with Nix\ (38 comments)