runj VS runc

a couple projects underway for containers, still wip but promising.

https://hackmd.io/7BIT_khIRQyPAe4EdiigHg

https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj

> it's a shame that docker is built around linux

There is some interesting work happening to get an OCI-compatible runtime working

https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj

So somebody else created runj (runj is an experimental, proof-of-concept OCI-compatible runtime for FreeBSD jails.) https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj

Shout out to https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj which aims to provide OCI compatible runtime for FreeBSD jails. We are working on a Jails based sandbox implementation for running OCaml builds on FreeBSD, https://github.com/ocurrent/obuilder. If runj gets more support then it would be a good alternative to the various iocage/ezjail/etc solutions or the raw Jails implementation we have right now.

If you want to get a little more bleeding edge, follow along with samuelkarp/runj project which attempts to get docker images running via runj/containerd

containerd only runs on FreeBSD with the help of a shim to use [runj](https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj) as a backend for running the actual jails containers.

> VM's disk is a zfs filesystem on the host, it makes snapshotting (edit- ok maybe not, see below) and managing it super easy!

I think you mean that it's a ZFS volume? Although it should be possible to export a filesystem to a guest over NFS (or I guess 9p), but I haven't run into a lot of discussion or gotten around to testing it myself...

> It would be really cool if there were tools that brought them in line with docker, in terms of easy deployment and provisioning of new jails/vms. If I didn't have so many damn project ideas already...

My dream would be to see https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj polished and docker+containerd+runj made to work as the way to run the docker frontend with jails as the backend.

https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj is a proof of concept.

Pull up your sleeves and start committing

Experimental FreeBSD on FreeBSD OCI containers with runj

I can speak to this. Containers, and by extension k8s, break a well known security boundary that has existed for a very long time - whether you are using a real (hardware) server or a virtual machine on the cloud if you pop that instance/server generally speaking you only have access to that server. Yeh, you might find a db config with connection details if you landed on say a web app host but in general you still have to work to start popping the next N servers.

That's not the case when you are running in k8s and the last container breakout was just announced ~1 month ago: https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/security/advisories/G... .

At the end of the day it is simply not a security boundary. It can solve other problems but not security ones.

It's interesting that, in light of things like this, you still see large software companies adding support for new components written in non-memory safe languages (e.g. C)

As an example Red Hat OpenShift added support for crun(https://github.com/containers/crun) this year(https://cloud.redhat.com/blog/whats-new-in-red-hat-openshift...), which is written in C as an alternative to runc, which is written in Go(https://github.com/opencontainers/runc)...

Rabbit hole indeed. That wasn't related to my job at the time, lol. The job change came with a company-provided computer and that put an end to the tinkering.

BTW, I found my hacks to make runc run on Chromebook: https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/compare/main...gabrys...

being the main author of crun, I can clarify that statement: I am not a fan of Go _for this particular use case_.

Using C instead of Go avoided a bunch of the workarounds that exists in runc to workaround the Go runtime, e.g. https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/blob/main/libcontaine...

runc

Not OP, but if I had to guess, a lot of this can be picked up by just observing common security issues in the Linux space, since similar mistakes and oversights have caused quite a few real-world CVEs in the past, e.g. this random example of a TOCTTOU vulnerability in runc.