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Comment by zabcik | Hacker News Reader

So moby now uses containerd, which I guess is not related to systemd even though systemd also has its own container system. Are there any components to moby that are OSS and a part of the linux stack or is this whole endeavor to break away from linux dependencies?

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> So moby now uses containerd

Correct. Moby uses containerd because Docker uses containerd.

> which I guess is not related to systemd

You guessed correctly.

> even though systemd also has its own container system

Correct I believe systemd uses a tool called nspawn to isolate processes in containers. We don't use systemd/nspawn, but I think it would be a cool customization to build a Moby assembly that uses systemd.

> Are there any components to moby that are OSS

All Moby components are open-source.

> and a part of the linux stack

All Moby components run great on Linux.

> or is this whole endeavor to break away from linux dependencies?

Moby works great with Linux and will continue to. In fact you can build a complete custom Linux system with Moby, thanks to LinuxKit. (But you can also target an existing Linux system, LinuxKit is optional).

Right, I was just assuming that the reason to build alternatives to these existing linux utilities would be to target other host OS like Windows or Mac. Thanks for the explanation.

>> or is this whole endeavor to break away from linux dependencies?

> Moby works great with Linux and will continue to. In fact you can build a complete custom Linux system with Moby, thanks to LinuxKit. (But you can also target an existing Linux system, LinuxKit is optional).

I think the question was more along the lines of "Are these changes being made to add support for other Operating Systems?" and less "Are you abandoning Linux?"

I don't think anyone was questioning your commitment to Linux, though I kind of am now because of how defensive that non-answer was.

Somehow I feel that with this announcement and his (defensive) answers to simple questions that call for clarification, that the interest in rkt just went up some.

Honestly, I wish rkt would get some more momentum. In my opinion it's superior to Docker.

where's the Rocket Hub? Seriously how long is Docker Hub expected to float up there? Some are good quality, all the versions of tomcat for example. How long can such quality continue to exist?

That would be https://quay.io/ , but also the internet. Since rkt (or appc discovery rather) just relies on DNS/URL hierarchy to refer to images. Any web server can be a "registry".

OCI doesn't have an equivalent to discovery yet, but presumably it'll be something similar to the appc spec (https://github.com/appc/spec/blob/master/spec/discovery.md)

I'm one of the people working in the OCI community. Discovery/distribution is something that I care alot about personally and the whole "any web server can be a registry" idea is definitely where I want OCI to go with this. As someone who helps develop a distribution (openSUSE / SUSE Linux Enterprise) my opinion is that the current state of distribution really needs to be improved.

I also recently talked to some CoreOS devs at Dockercon and have started considering extending rkt to better support OCI runtimes (and images though images are "supported" at the moment). Exciting times.

There's https://quay.io but it doesn't really function as a marketplace for official images (except the ones from CoreOS).

I wish the market of container images had more competition. Right now there's Docker Hub/Quay (expensive, lots of features) and Amazon ECR/Google Container Registry (cheap, few features).

rkt runs docker images and OCI images. https://coreos.com/rkt/docs/latest/running-docker-images.htm...

> I think the question was more along the lines of "Are these changes being made to add support for other Operating Systems?" and less "Are you abandoning Linux?"

I see. Looks like I had misunderstood.

Yes, being able to target more different platforms is one of the reason for the change.

Docker the company looking into other host OSs would make sense to me for two reasons:

- RedHat eating Docker's lunch, and dominating Linux development

- the somewhat questionable practice of using Docker as a GPL-circumvention device (eg. commercial images pulling a Debian/Ubuntu userland on first load), though I'm unsure about the legal implications

If Moby depends on LinuxKit, why the LinuxKit's README ask you to build the Moby tool as first thing, and all the examples imply using moby? Shouldn't LinuxKit be agnostic of the existence of Moby?

I think the additional confusion here is that LinuxKit (or at least the resulting OS that powers Docker for Mac/Win/etc) used to be internally called Moby, so the build tool just hasn't been renamed.

You can use the LinuxKit components independently, but right now the easy way is to use the Moby tool. Sorry about the confusion though, we are trying to make it clearer.

Here is a summary we wrote earlier for Moby https://mobyproject.org/#moby-and-docker

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