osbuilder

The Kata Containers runtime creates a virtual machine (VM) to isolate a set of container workloads. The VM requires a guest kernel and a guest operating system ("guest OS") to boot and create containers inside the guest environment.

This repository contains tools to create a guest OS disk image.

Table of Contents

• Terms

Terms

This section describes the terms used for all documentation in this repository.

• rootfs

  The root filesystem or "rootfs" is the set of files contained in the guest root directory that builds into a filesystem.

  See the rootfs builder documentation.

• "Guest OS" (or "Guest Image")

  A "virtual disk" or "disk image" built from a rootfs. It contains a filesystem that is used by the VM, in conjunction with a guest kernel, to create an environment to host the container. Neither the guest OS nor the guest kernel need to be the same as the host operating system.

  See the image builder documentation.

• initrd (or "initramfs")

  A compressed cpio archive loaded into memory and used as part of the Linux startup process. During startup, the kernel unpacks it into a special instance of a tmpfs that becomes the initial root file system.

  See the initrd builder documentation.

• "Base OS"

  A particular version of a Linux distribution used to create a Guest OS from.