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Comment by codehusker | Hacker News Reader

CoreOS has done a lot of work to avoid a monoculture of Docker containers, and I think we all benefit from the interchangeability of different implementations/runtimes.

The future of containers just keeps getting brighter and brighter.

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Isn't this just a Linux monoculture? It's not like you can run most containers as-is on a platform like OS X without actually virtualizing Linux itself.

Not necessarily. You need a platform which supports Linux syscalls, but you don't need Linux per se. Unlike VMs, containers sit above the kernel so you're tied to its interface but not its implementation. For example, see Solaris' LX Branded Zones.

At Joyent, our Triton cloud stack is built on illumos (nee Solaris) LX branded zones. We also have a Docker-compatible remote API, so not only can you run unmodified Linux binaries in containers, you can do so using the regular Docker client CLI!

Dropping POSIX in favor of a syscall ABI implicitly defined by Linux's implementation is a pretty substantial backwards step.

While not true yet, Docker is working on this by replacing the underlying LXC with their own secret sauce (at least last I checked). I suspect this is a result of their partnership with Microsoft (http://www.zdnet.com/article/dockers-unikernel-acquisition-t...). They were also moving towards creating proprietary and unique management tools before CoreOS started putting pressure on them.

Also notable is Docker isn't just containers, but they also have strong design opinions and container "philosophy".

It would work fine on OS X if that operating system actually had equivalent control group or namespace functionality. OS X / Darwin lack these features, hence the boot2docker VM.

Docker runs natively on FreeBSD as of release 11 (which does require the new Linux 64-bit compatibility facility). It uses jails to achieve the same effect and in fact uses the very same images available on the default Docker hub. Also Docker has released beta engines for both Mac and Windows. So no, it's not a Linux monoculture even when considering only Docker.

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