"bootc compatible" images

At the current time, it does not work to just do:

FROM fedora
RUN dnf -y install kernel

or

FROM debian
RUN apt install linux

And get an image compatible with bootc. Supporting any base image is an eventual goal, however there are a few reasons why this doesn't yet work. The biggest reason is SELinux labeling support; the underlying ostree stack currently handles this and requires that the "base image" have a pre-computed set of labels that can be used for any derived layers.

Building bootc compatible base images

As a corollary to base-image limitations, the build process for generating base images currently requires running through ostree tooling to generate an "ostree commit" which has some special formatting in the base image.

The two most common ways to do this are to either:

  1. compose a compatible OCI image directly via rpm-ostree compose image
  2. encapsulate an ostree commit using rpm-ostree compose container-encapsulate

The first method is most direct, as it streamlines the process of creating a base image and writing to a registry. The second method may be preferable if you already have a build process that produces ostree commits as an output (e.g. using osbuild to produce ostree commit artifacts.)

The requirement for both methods is that your initial treefile/manifest MUST include the bootc package in list of packages included in your compose.

However, the ostree usage is an implementation detail and the requirement on this will be lifted in the future.

Standard metadata for bootc compatible images

It is strongly recommended to do:

LABEL containers.bootc 1

This will signal that this image is intended to be usable with bootc.

Deriving from existing base images

It's important to emphasize that from one of these specially-formatted base images, every tool and technique for container building applies! In other words it will Just Work to do

FROM <bootc base image>
RUN dnf -y install foo && dnf clean all

You can then use podman build, buildah, docker build, or any other container build tool to produce your customized image. The only requirement is that the container build tool supports producing OCI container images.

The ostree container commit command

You may find some references to this; it is no longer very useful and is not recommended.

The bootloader setup

At the current time bootc relies on the bootupd project which handles bootloader installs and upgrades. The invocation of bootc install will always run bootupd to perform installations. Additionally, bootc upgrade will currently not upgrade the bootloader; you must invoke bootupctl update.

SELinux

Container runtimes such as podman and docker commonly apply a "coarse" SELinux policy to running containers. See container-selinux. It is very important to understand that non-bootc base images do not (usually) have any embedded security.selinux metadata at all; all labels on the toplevel container image are dynamically generated per container invocation, and there are no individually distinct e.g. etc_t and usr_t types.

In contrast, with the current OSTree backend for bootc, when the base image is built, label metadata is included in special metadata files in /sysroot/ostree that correspond to components of the base image.

When a bootc container is deployed, the system will use these default SELinux labels. Further non-OSTree layers will be dynamically labeled using the base policy.

Hence, at the current time it will not work to override the labels for files in derived layers by using e.g.

RUN semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_content_t "/web(/.*)?"

(This command will write to /etc/selinux/$policy/policy/.)

It will never work to do e.g.:

RUN chcon -t foo_t /usr/bin/foo

Because the container runtime state will deny the attempt to "physically" set the security.selinux extended attribute. In contrast per above, future support for custom labeling will by default be done by customizing the policy file_contexts.

Toplevel directories

In particular, a common problem is that inside a container image, it's easy to create arbitrary toplevel directories such as e.g. /app or /aimodel etc. But in some SELinux policies such as Fedora derivatives, these will be labeled as default_t which few domains can access.

References: