Transactional, in-place operating system updates using OCI/Docker container images.
The original Docker container model of using "layers" to model applications has been extremely successful. This project aims to apply the same technique for bootable host systems - using standard OCI/Docker containers as a transport and delivery format for base operating system updates.
The container image includes a Linux kernel (in e.g. /usr/lib/modules),
which is used to boot. At runtime on a target system, the base userspace is
not itself running in a "container" by default. For example, assuming
systemd is in use, systemd acts as pid1 as usual - there's no "outer" process.
More about this in the docs; see below.
NOTE: At the current time, bootc has not reached 1.0, and it is possible that some APIs and CLIs may change.
See the project documentation; there are also operating systems and distributions using bootc; here are some examples:
The Github discussion forum is enabled.
This project is also tightly related to the previously mentioned Fedora/CentOS bootc project, and many developers monitor the relevant discussion forums there. In particular there's a Matrix channel and a weekly video call meeting for example: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/community/.
Are you interested in working on bootc? Great! See our CONTRIBUTING.md guide.