Red Hat Gives Ubuntu A Bootc Up The Backside At Canonical Shindig
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
At Ubuntu Summit 26.04, Red Hat Principal Software Engineer Joseph Marrero Corchado presented a talk called Bootc: Use your container knowledge and infrastructure to build and deploy your Ubuntu hosts. Although Ubuntu is very strong in the desktop Linux space, in large corporate server environments, Ubuntu is just another distro among many. This can be a good thing: it is just another Linux distro, and that means that it's perfectly possible to deploy and manage it using existing FOSS tooling.
Marrero introduced himself by saying that he works at Red Hat, but personally runs Ubuntu - and has been doing so for long enough that he has some original media from Canonical's ShipIt program, which the company discontinued in 2011.
While we were surpised to see a Red Hat engineer presenting a talk at the summit, it's not unprecedented. System76's Pop!_OS distro is based on Ubuntu, but it overlaps with other distros as well. It has its own desktop and eschews Snap for Flatpak - and yet, at the previous Summit, System76 boss Carl Richell presented a talk about it. The year before, the Academy Software Foundation's talk started by telling us that Rocky Linux strongly dominated the SFX industry.
Our plan here isn't to recap the entire talk. It's up on YouTube now [video not reviewed --Ed], and if this is the sort of thing that sounds interesting, it's probably a good use of 42 minutes of your time.
We've mentioned the bootc toolchain a few times on The Register. Back in April 2024, we reported that Fedora 40's immutable editions were being rebuilt as bootable containers. Two years and four more Fedora releases later, the toolchain is getting more mature, as we covered in April with Fedora 44, and we linked to Quentin Joly's explainer, Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment, which is still one of the best we've read.
Now bootc has graduated to the point of being a CNCF incubator project. The new project website has a slightly better explanation:
The tools for creating and managing OCI containers are familiar to many sysadmins now, and the idea of bootc is to make it possible to manage complete OS images, either for VMs or for bare metal, using the same tooling.
Marrero explained bootc by saying that it lets you perform OS installations and upgrades with OCI containers, which lets you define and ship your customized images of the Ubuntu OS as OCI container images. This allows transactional in-place updates, with rollback.
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