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A comment on Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microservices. Parent comment

Re:Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microser... by ctalledo on Friday August 07, 2020 @04:37PM (#24086187)
Thanks! Yes, Sysbox is using OS-virtualization techniques to augment the abstraction of the container, thereby enabling software that interacts deeply with the kernel (e.g., dockerd, k8s, etc) to run inside the container, and do so with proper isolation (no privileged containers). Now that you mention user-mode linux, it is one of the references we used as we built Sysbox, though they are very different things of course. I think my background as a VMware ESX kernel developer played a strong influence too ...
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Re:Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microser... by swsieber on Friday August 07, 2020 @04:40PM (#24086215)
So can you run sysbox in sysbox?
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Re:Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microser... by ctalledo on Friday August 07, 2020 @04:48PM (#24086293)
Unfortunately not. Sysbox requires "true root" privileges, so it can't run inside a system container deployed by Sysbox itself (since that system container would use the user namespace). You can run Sysbox inside a privileged container however, and in fact the Sysbox test framework relies on this heavily.

What use case do you envision for running sysbox in sysbox?

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Re:Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microser... by danielheath on Saturday August 08, 2020 @04:42AM (#24090103)
No OP but one of my first questions about any layer is “how transparent is it”. If it can’t host itself, it’s clearly not 100% transparent.

This matters because it adds cognitive overhead - I have to keep track of which features are available at which layer.

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Re:Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microser... by ctalledo on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @02:01PM (#24123536)
Agreed; it's certainly something we will keep in mind as we mature Sysbox.
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Re:Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microser... by swsieber on Friday August 07, 2020 @08:40PM (#24087934)
It's mostly curiosity. Probably docker in docker in docker.
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Re:Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microser... by ctalledo on Friday August 07, 2020 @11:39PM (#24088748)
Got it; note that inside a system container you can always run docker-in-docker using privileged containers (https://hub.docker.com/_/docker). That is, you don't need sysbox nesting in order to run more levels of docker nesting inside the system container. And those privileged containers would only be privileged within the system container, but not at host level.
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Re:Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microser... by swsieber on Saturday August 08, 2020 @12:15AM (#24088892)
Oh, that's cool. TIL. Thanks for taking the time to respond to something pretty far off in the weeds.
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