[lxc-devel] Last minute template addition - universal image based template

[Stéphane Graber]

Hey everyone,

First of all, sorry for coming up with that so late in the 1.0
development cycle. I tried to convince myself for a long time that this
wasn't necessary but reality is that with unprivileged containers, we
need to start thinking about new ways to let our users create
containers.

So briefly put, the idea is to introduce a new template called simply
enough "download" (I'm open to better name suggestions) which instead of
doing our usual magic of building a rootfs locally will instead download
a pre-built rootfs and some metadata from a central server.

My goal is to make the dependencies of that template minimal enough that
it should be able to run on every distribution that ships LXC, ideally,
including Android.


Now as for the implementation, the plan is to bring up a new server on
the linuxcontainers.org domain which will sit at:
https://images.linuxcontainers.org

The structure of that server will be something like
├── images
│   ├── debian
│   │   └── wheezy
│   │       └── armhf
│   │           └── default
│   │               └── 2014-01-10_19:35
│   │                   ├── meta.tar.gz
│   │                   ├── meta.tar.gz.asc
│   │                   ├── rootfs.tar.gz
│   │                   └── rootfs.tar.gz.asc
│   └── ubuntu
│       └── 14.04
│           └── amd64
│               └── default
│                   └── 2014-01-10_19:30
│                       ├── meta.tar.gz
│                       ├── meta.tar.gz.asc
│                       ├── rootfs.tar.gz
│                       └── rootfs.tar.gz.asc
└── meta
    └── 1.0
        ├── index-system
        ├── index-system.asc
        ├── index-user
        └── index-user.asc

So the filesystem structure is fairly logical and user friendly. Now as
for the details of the various files.

rootfs.tar.gz is a tarball of only the root filesystem of the container
with the tarball starting at what will be the root of the container.

meta.tar.gz is a tarball containing a bit of metadata which the template
script will need, that includes:
 - config (mandatory; text file containing a minimal set of config
           options to include in the container's config)
 - fstab (mandatory; a standard fstab text file)
 - expiry (mandatory; text file containing the Unix Epoch of the
           recommended expiry date for the image)
 - create-message (mandatory; text file which will be displayed to the
                   user post-create)
 - *.<compat-level> (optional; any of the above may be overriden by
                     appending .<compat-level> to their name which will be
                     used instead of the original if the compat-level
                     matches that of the currently running LXC).

The index-* files are standard CSV files with the following syntax:
 - <distribution>;<version>;<architecture>;<variant>;<current build>;<url>

index-system is for system containers, index-user is for unprivileged
containers. index-{system|user}.<compat-level> is also supported and overrides
the main index if found.

All of those files are signed by the server's GPG key which will be
stored in-line in the script.


The template itself will require the following arguments:
 - distribution
 - version
 - architecture

And the following will be optional:
 - variant [default: default]
 - server [default: https://images.linuxcontainers.org]
 - pubkey [default: inline gpg key]
 - no-validate [default: off]

The goal for the template is to only depend on:
 - POSIX shell
 - wget
 - tar
 - gzip

Which should be satisfiable even by busybox.

However, the template will require --no-validate if gpg isn't also
installed on the system.

The initial set of distros to be supported that way will be any distro
that can currently be built from an Ubuntu system (as that's what
linuxcontainers.org uses) and that uses the new common-config (currently
only ubuntu and ubuntu-cloud) setup (as I really don't want massive
config files that change all the time to be part of those images).

The compat-level stuff mentioned above is there to allow us to change
the way the server works without breaking backward compatibility. It
also allows us to introduce new templates to the system only for
releases of LXC which support them.
The initial value will be "1" and I'm going to need a very very good
reason for bumping it (which is why I want all those distros to use
lxc.include for their config).


With all that said, I'll start working on the implementation of this and
hope to have the server working with ubuntu and debian images published
over the next few days.
If any other distro is interested (I very much hope they all will),
start by switching to lxc.include for your config, using something
similar to what ubuntu is doing, then get in touch with me.

-- 
Stéphane Graber
Ubuntu developer
http://www.ubuntu.com
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