Re: Containers on Guix

[宋文武 <iyzsong@gmail.com>]

David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:

> Hello all,
>
> As some of you know, I wrote 'guix environment' as the first step on my
> journey to use Guix to improve my (and hopefully others) software
> development workflow.  Now that the basics are working, I'm interested
> in taking things further.  In particular, I want to extend 'guix
> environment' to support spawning VMs and then, hopefully, containers
> (those things that the Docker folks have been talking about so much
> lately).
>
> 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 think what we need is pflask: https://github.com/ghedo/pflask

A container is programs or full os running in an isolated environment.
For a full container with rootfs, we can:
  build the rootfs:
    of Guix:    by using a form of `guix system init'
    of Debian:  by using debootstrap

  get it running:
    # pflask --chroot=rootfs /sbin/init
  
For a lightweight container without rootfs, we can:
  build the activate script by `guix build'
  get it running:
    $ pflask --user=$USER activate
    (could run by normal user by using User namespace)
>
> 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
Isolation is archieved by using Linux namespaces, IMO dmd will work
well.
> a container creation program, would it make it harder to support the
> Hurd?
>
> I'm lost and confused!  Send help! :)
>
> -- 
> David Thompson
> Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
> GPG Key: 0FF1D807
> Support the FSF: https://fsf.org/donate