nix-portable VS containerd

There is also nix-portable (https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable), which is basically a drop-in replacement for normal nix that does everything required for no-root operation by itself when needed. Just put the single binary in your PATH and it's ready.

level (/nix/store/)

Yes, for cache hits to happen it has to be this way as far as I remember.

There is a project called nix-portable though that I've seen some HPC users report success with:

https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable

Great work Graham and team, I'll be switching to it on OSX.

I wonder if you took a look at some of the modifications done by portable-nix (https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable), most important ones being:

a) Allowing user to choose the location of the nix folder (for example $HOME/.nix) by using bwrap or proot

you can install it and forget about it. yeah the major downside is that you need to disable selinux unless you use nix portable.

Yeah sadly nix-portable doesn't support macOS because of missing kernel features. They are also thinking about docker fallback though: https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable/issues/23 🤔😋

There is this: https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable but I agree we need an official solution

Not entirely true, there are many ways in which you can use a custom location and still take advantage of the binary cache. You can do it with chroot, file system namespaces, bind mounts and so on. There's also a nice user friendly tool that does exactly this [1].

[1]: https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable

This is cool! In a similar vein, it's worth mentioning nix-portable is a thing. Same idea of containerization except it avoids docker. https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable

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/.