Lightning Talk: Shipping Container Runtimes as Systemd-Sysext Images – Krish Jain, University of Rochester
During my internship with the Flatcar team, I was tasked to work with adding a systemd-sysext build tool to the Flatcar Container Linux SDK and using it for a Docker sysext image, migrating from Torcx to it. Torcx is a boot-time addon manager used to ship Docker and Containerd. My project was structured mainly around plumbing efforts around Flatcar. I had the opportunity to not just work with the Flatcar team (distributed between Germany, India, Netherlands and France), but also collaborate and help assist community members. It was a great collaborative experience for me and I was able to work with such a diverse team! The OS images we provided were not suitable as base for building Flatcar-specific sysext images: it lacked the package metadata and Portage configuration, in order to keep end user OS image clean. My script now retains this information and allows you to produce systemd-sysexts to extend the system. This script can be used to build a Flatcar sysext image. Recommended to run from image build folder. It was great to see my work on introducing the build_sysext script now also being used to build the OEM sysexts (such as for Azure) and being able to review that PR.
