bootc

Transactional, in-place operating system updates using OCI/Docker container images.

Motivation

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.

Status

NOTE: At the current time, bootc has not reached 1.0, and it is possible that some APIs and CLIs may change.

Documentation

See the project documentation; there are also operating systems and distributions using bootc; here are some examples:

• https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/
• https://www.heliumos.org/

Developing bootc

Are you interested in working on bootc? Great! See our CONTRIBUTING.md guide.