Quoting David Thompson (2014-11-19 21:34:49)
> I did some reading about how Docker creates containers and discovered
> that it uses systemd-nspawn[0] to do it.  Since Guix uses dmd, using
> systemd-nspawn isn't an option.  Does anyone have thoughts on how we
> might have similar functionality in the Guix distro?


I'm not so sure that docker actually needs systemd -- the docker
documentation has instructions for a number of systems that don't use
systemd. A quick scan suggests they're using lxc, at least on some
systems.
 
> Would an nspawn equivalent be appropriate for dmd?  Or a completely
> separate program?  This seems to be a Linux only feature, so if we added
> a container creation program, would it make it harder to support the
> Hurd?

I'm sure there are other things already packaged that don't really have
any hope of working on top of another kernel. This is going to be hard
to do portably, but I don't think it's worth worrying about too much
yet. Probably some work will have to happen upstream on the Hurd
project.