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Software Data Storage Open Source Linux

Docker 0.7 Runs On All Linux Distributions 88

Posted by Soulskill from the go-big-or-go-home dept.
rjmarvin writes "Docker 0.7 was released today, with 7 major new features including support to run on all Linux distributions. No longer capable solely on running on Debian and Ubuntu Linux, Docker 0.7 adds support for distributions such as Red Hat, SUSE, Gentoo and Arch. From the announcement: 'A key feature of Docker is the ability to create many copies of the same base filesystem almost instantly. Under the hood Docker makes heavy use of AUFS by Junjiro R. Okajima as a copy-on-write storage mechanism. AUFS is an amazing piece of software and at this point it’s safe to say that it has safely copied billions of containers over the last few years, a great many of them in critical production environments. Unfortunately, AUFS is not part of the standard linux kernel and it’s unclear when it will be merged. This has prevented docker from being available on all Linux systems. Docker 0.7 solves this problem by introducing a storage driver API, and shipping with several drivers. Currently 3 drivers are available: AUFS, VFS (which uses simple directories and copy) and DEVICEMAPPER, developed in collaboration with Alex Larsson and the talented team at Red Hat, which uses an advanced variation of LVM snapshots to implement copy-on-write. An experimental BTRFS driver is also being developed, with even more coming soon: ZFS, Gluster, Ceph, etc. When the docker daemon is started it will automatically select a suitable driver depending on its capabilities.'"
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Docker 0.7 Runs On All Linux Distributions More

Docker 0.7 Runs On All Linux Distributions

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  • DOes this have something to do with boats? I hate boats, why is Slashdort posting news about boats? I mean, I really hate boats. Don't get me started, Slashdort.

  • Awesome! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mythosaz ( 572040 ) on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @07:10PM (#45533261)

    ...now what the fuck is a docker?

    • Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @07:16PM (#45533303)

      I think I read something about this on the net. There was a "Day of the Docker" thing on BBC.. so I guess it must be some British thing 50 years in the making.

      • British thing?

        "Docker is Pants"!

        Yanks won't get...

    • As far as I can tell it's a chroot jail with limitations.

    • Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Informative)

      by bondsbw ( 888959 ) on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @07:31PM (#45533415)

      From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

      Docker is an open source project that automates the deployment of applications inside software containers.

      And then [wikipedia.org]:

      Operating system-level virtualization is a server virtualization method where the kernel of an operating system allows for multiple isolated user-space instances, instead of just one. Such instances (often called containers, VEs, VPSs or jails) may look and feel like a real server, from the point of view of its owner.

      On Unix-based systems, this technology can be thought of as an advanced implementation of the standard chroot mechanism. In addition to isolation mechanisms, the kernel often provides resource management features to limit the impact of one container's activities on the other containers.

      So my takeaway is that each container would feel like a full virtual machine, but with only the overhead of separate user-spaces and without the overhead of loading an entire operating system into each. A neat approach, really.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        No doubt it'll be subsumed into systemd as one of its services next year.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Lennie ( 16154 )

        It is actually used for application containers.

        Which means, only the application is started, not a complete userspace.

        Making it even more efficient.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's a jigsaw. It's a power drill. It's a wood-turning lathe. It's an asphalt spreader. It's 67 tools in one!

    • Re:Awesome! (Score:4, Informative)

      by majesticmerc ( 1353125 ) on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @07:53PM (#45533589) Homepage
      I read the "About Docker" page on their website and it says this:

      Docker is an open-source project to easily create lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale, in production, on VMs, bare metal, OpenStack clusters, public clouds and more.

      Even after reading it, I've got no fucking idea what it does! Their "read more" page just shits out a whole load of buzzwords.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Even after reading it, I've got no fucking idea what it does! Their "read more" page just shits out a whole load of buzzwords.

        It's container-style virtualization. Which has been around forever. Even on Linux.

        But apparently, everything old is new again sometime, and this is the time.

        Granted, it's probably about time, after all, since Docker doesn't appear to suck complete ass and isn't commercial (either of which has largely been the main problem with previous Linux containerization).

        • Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Informative)

          by kjs3 ( 601225 ) on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @08:27PM (#45533837)
          Docker is indeed hot right now, for some pretty good reasons.
          • - (Relatively) easy to use management wrapper around LCX, in particular quick deployment and a templating mechanism to describe container contents and deal with dependencies
          • - Uses a union filesystem to thiny provision containers, with development work to use other filesystem mechanisms to achieve the same goal
          • - There's a ecosystem to share containers similar to ecosystems around sharing pre-built virtual machines
          • - Backed by a commercial company

          Sure...done before. Evolution, not revolution. Very useful if you fit it's use case.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by gmuslera ( 3436 )

          Is more than just containers. You have containers, but oriented to run a single process (i.e. OpenVZ, another virtualization for Linux, usually runs a whole set of processes), uses cgroups to limit cpu/network/io, have its own users so the containers root is not the system one, and a very nice command to make things far easier than it was with LXC. Really have very little overhead (if any) compared with running native programs, but isolated from the filesystem/process/network

          But for me one of the stronges

      • I think the intent is for Docker to have the 'mind share' , so the about page is all about what Docker can do.

        All the work is done by LXC. Docker is a front end for LXC.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kjs3 ( 601225 )
          I'm not sure what the point is here. I mean, I suppose your right in the same sense as Drupal is a front end for a database and PHP is a front end for a web server. I just don't get the derisive tone.

          • Really?

            First, I think Docker is pretty awesome. Many people have been struggling with home grown solutions for LXC for a while now and Docker comes along and wows us, like dang it's clear how it should be done now that I've seen it.

            But. I am disappointed in the lack of words given to LXC.

            Your analogy would be appropriate if dozens of people worked for almost a decade inventing a database and then someone had a great idea for a really usable front end. And presented it to a database ignorant world with ha

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by kjs3 ( 601225 )
              If you go to the Drupal page, you get a lot about how great Drupal is, and one line about "and we use one of these databases". So I think my analogy is spot on. Further, if you do more than read the linked Docker announcement, the fact they are layered on LXC is pretty much all over the docs. Or do you suggest we have to start referring to it as "LXC/Docker" to make sure noone could possibly not know there's a connection.

              • ...And presented it to a database ignorant world...

                It's hardly the same.

        • Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)

          by mythosaz ( 572040 ) on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @12:05AM (#45535111)

          Awesome!

          ...what the fuck is LXC?

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by pmontra ( 738736 )
            I googled LXC for you and found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Containers [wikipedia.org]

            LXC provides operating system-level virtualization not via a virtual machine, but rather provides a virtual environment that has its own process and network space. LXC relies on the Linux kernel cgroups functionality that was released in version 2.6.24. It also relies on other kinds of namespace-isolation functionality, which were developed and integrated into the mainline Linux kernel. It is used by Heroku to provide separation be

      • Docker is an open-source project to easily create lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers

        The Christmas gift-giving season is coming. Everyone is going to need some lightweight, portable containers, right?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mikael ( 484 )

        I had to look at their website to figure it out. The two most important criteria for me when considering installing any new Linux service is: (1) Is it a server, (2) Does it provide access to a filesystem and (3) Does it access the window system?

        Docker is a type of virtualization system. But rather than duplicating the entire set of kernel services; file systems, displays, IO ports, hardware, it only duplicates the network services through "containers". These are file systems that hook up to the OS and file

    • The first word of the summary is a link explaining exactly what Docker is. Click it!

      • you fail at having any understanding of proper technical journalism, just as the summary writer did. Slashdot is becoming electronic tabloid trash.

    • the dockers [fremantlefc.com.au]

  • relevant Onion article (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spike hay ( 534165 ) <blu_ice AT violate DOT me DOT uk> on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @07:12PM (#45533275) Homepage

    here [theonion.com]

  • Similar to OSX bundles, or to Application Virtualization (ThinApp) on Windows.

    Combined with a universal overlay filesystem, this is a great thing.

  • Does it run on Windows?

  • If you had to guess what a piece of software called "Docker" did, what would you think?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      hmmm. gotta be either a semi-violent porn simulation or a visual desktop theme that gives that dressed-up-but-not-that--dressed-up casual look. cant tell, but site's slashdotted so must be the first one.

    • Here I was thinking that it was part of Unity, namely the side taskbar. Then I was thinking... Why would a taskbar need it's own storage API? Then I remembered... It isn't the first time that Canonical added some odd cruft to Unity.

      Then I searched it out and scratched my head as to why those things would need to be added to chroot.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kjs3 ( 601225 )
      If you had to guess what a piece of software called "Apache" did, what would you think? If you had to guess what a piece of software called "Hadoop" did, what would you think? If you had to guess what a piece of software called "C" did, what would you think? If you had to guess what a piece of software called "Postgres" did, what would you think? If you had to guess....blah, blah, blah...

      • Re:Why that name? (Score:4, Informative)

        by LMariachi ( 86077 ) on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @09:39PM (#45534323) Journal

        Except that a "dock" is already a common thing in computer UIs, whereas an Indian tribe and the name of a developer's kid's toy elephant are not. It's as if someone came out with a product called "mouseWM" that was neither a window manager nor accepted mouse input, but was actually a scripting language or something.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kjs3 ( 601225 )
          Must not name collide with anything related to computers, no matter how tenuously related. Gotcha. Redefine the issue enough times, you get to be right, I suppose.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'd think it were a system tray [debian.org].

  • Looks like someone figured out how to put a fancy spin on chroot. Sweet.

    • A lot of people have been working on this for a *long* time. I think the initial contributions to the kernel were from IBM maybe six years ago. This is much bigger than a fancy spin.

      *This* is what cgroups were put in place to do iirc.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fatphil ( 181876 )
        Despite the fact that the cgroups maintainer have openly admitted that cgoups is now (as of mid-september, at least) a completely illogical mess?

        We need fewer clients for cgoups, not more, so that it can be killed with fire.

  • I shouldn't have to go look it up.

  • Years coming. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by visualight ( 468005 )

    Linux Containers are one of the greatest things to come to linux in the last ten years. Looking at the comments posted here already it's no wonder my pleas for time to work in something like this never got any traction. Docker's going to be a game changer.

    All you managers that didn't think LXC was relevant, look at Docker and suck it. Could have been you dumbass.

  • What the hell does it do?

  • Aside from the fact we should not have to look up some esoteric item to see what the hell we are talking about, and if we care...

    For those in the know: is this something like thinapp or cameyo for Linux that is truly virtual, or is it more of a portable jail? Not that i cant read, but i see the words 'virtual' misused so often it shard to tell without digging too deep. If it is truly virtualized that is cool, if its yet anther jail/chroot management tool, *yawn*

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lennie ( 16154 )

      Yes, containers are like jail/chroot. But containers in more recent Linux kernels are now mature enough to almost do all things Solaris Zones does. Like proper security and with use of the http://criu.org/ [criu.org] project, you can also do live-migration in many cases.

  • The main question is - what is a Linux container, and why do I care about it? I don't care about some awfully named Linux program that has been ported to other distros. Why call it "Docker" if it has nothing to do with men's slacks or the icon dock at the bottom of the screen? Asking what Docker is results in a blizzard of acronyms and terms that only matter to someone who already knows what it is. The real question is, what is a Linux container? Why do people use them? Anyone talking about Linux containers

  • it is an important feature of dockers :p

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @09:34AM (#45537861)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lennie ( 16154 )

      In a way, yes.

      You specify what distro and version your application can run on and you create a container with Docker which uses that image as a base to run your application.

      Basically: Linux-application on top of Linux-distribution inside a container on top of an other Linux distribution.

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