Moby VS nixery

Having been featured in our February 2023, and January 2024 Release Radars, Moby is the original Linux Container runtime. This new version adds a bunch of changes to the Docker CLI and Moby itself with additional features. There's bug fixes and enhancements, with the main thing for users to be on the look out for containers that were created using Docker Engine 25.0.0. These containers might have duplicate MAC addresses, and thus must be recreated. The same goes for those containers created with Moby 25.0+ and with user defined MAC addresses. Read up on all these changes in the release notes.

Formlabs does this as well for their 3d printers, my earliest encounter of this was when Docker started getting popular: https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/pkg/namesgenerator/...

Try to use moby instead since that is the engine in Docker.

https://github.com/moby/moby

> Podman is designed to help with this by providing stronger default security settings compared to Docker. Features like rootless containers, user namespaces, and seccomp profiles, while available in Docker, aren't enabled by default and often require extra setup.

Seccomp has been enabled by default since 2015: https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/18780

It is true that Rootless isn't enabled by default but its "extra setup" can be done with a single command (`dockerd-rootless-setuptool.sh install`)

Perhaps.

Thing is, https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/670bc0a46c4ca03b75f1e72f73... is using https://github.com/mistifyio/go-zfs which features code like `out, err := zfsOutput("get", "-H", key, d.Name)` (Source: https://github.com/mistifyio/go-zfs/blob/master/zfs.go#L315) to get a single zfs property.

Somebody chose to use a library as abstraction that looks good but is implemented as a MVP (nothing wrong with that). "In the future, we hope to work directly with libzfs" should have raised an alarm somewhere, though.

AppArmor can restrict /proc and this is even used by docker: https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/contrib/apparmor/te...

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)