Red Hat rethinks Linux distributions in the container era

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Red Hat hopes to bring cloud-native-based build and deployment practices to the Linux operating system itself.

Translated from Red Hat Rethinks the Linux Distro for the Container Age , author Joab Jackson.

DENVER — Just as you use containers to quickly launch applications, Red Hat wants to make launching an entire Linux-based operating system just as easy.

The company has launched its flagship Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), as a container image. In other words, all operating system code that is usually left out of containers (such as kernel firmware) will be included in this image.

The company announced the moves at its annual user conference, Red Hat Summit , taking place this week in Denver.

"This is something the industry needs," Colin Walters, senior principal software engineer at Red Hat, explained during a session at the summit. "The more you use cloud-native tools instead of building a unique bin for your infrastructure, the more you can leverage that open source maintenance and shared ownership."

This approach differs from the company's typical package model, in which a final copy of a new RHEL version is released as a standalone package to be installed on a server or virtual machine and then modified by administrators with customizations for specific workloads.

This packaging model has long been a tradition in the Linux distribution community and is increasingly different from the way applications are managed through containers today.

The idea is that "there are lessons we can learn on the container side that we can bring to the operating system world so that the two worlds aren't completely managed separately," Ben Breard , senior principal marketing manager at Red Hat, said in a Red Hat press release Say it!

The goal of a container-based Linux operating system, a presentation from Colin Walters

A wider range of workloads

The move is to make RHEL more flexible for a wider range of workloads. RHEL golden images are only available in certain environments. Many environments, such as edge or virtual desktop environments, end up requiring different bits of customization.

Containerization will greatly help simplify updates to these custom environments. Red Hats claims this makes testing and rollbacks easier.

Administrators can configure the operating system at build time rather than changing it after the operating system is installed. GitOps or continuous integration/continuous deployment workflow is already familiar to developers and can become a standard procedure for maintaining clusters of Linux servers running in different environments.

Virtually all cloud native tools are used to maintain operating systems.

Not just for temporary workloads

This isn't the first attempt at building an operating system in containers: RancherOS , Flatcar Linux , Talos , and CoreOS ( acquired by Red Hat in 2018 ) have all adopted this approach.

New in this release is new software called boot.c , which uses the same Open Container Initiative (OCI) standards that Docker uses to build application containers through multiple layers to layer the components that boot the host system.

Breard said the release "includes kernel firmware and everything you should historically leave out of a container." As a result, "We can now manage versions and deploy full operating systems using standard container tools that almost everyone has in-house."

This work actually stems from CoreOS features merged into OpenShift . In 2020, Red Hat renamed the CoreOS Container Linux operating system to (somewhat confusingly) Fedora CoreOS , a "container-optimized operating system." Unlike earlier container image-based systems, Red Hat's systems won't be entirely ephemeral. User data will remain in /etcthe directory while other components are updated as needed.

Walters explained that this approach is most valuable for most systems where some system and application data must be retained.

The goal of a container-based Linux operating system proposed by Colin Walters in his speech.

Disclaimer: Red Hat paid for this reporter's travel expenses to attend this conference.

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