Przemek Klosowski <przemek.klosowski(a)nist.gov> writes:
It would be nice if there was a 'container snapshot' facility
that
would convert between a native application package from Fedora or
Debian and a portable container---possibly both ways. Obviously,
native->container is desirable for portability; the opposite
conversion is less obviously useful but might be a basis for a
cross-platform packaging process in the future.
It's obviously not what you're thinking of, but there's Singularity,
under review <
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1331818>.
As an example, I haven't managed to port Scilab packaging to EPEL6, but
with singularity I can run the f23 version (or the Debian one) on RHEL6:
$ scilab -version
Scilab version "5.5.2.1427793548"
scilab-5.5.2
The executable is basically a Fedora 23 system image (installed with
yum, and quite large) with a configured entry point, in which you can
run other commands:
$ singularity exec `which scilab` rpm -q basesystem
basesystem-11-1.fc23.noarch
I'm not sure about "both ways", but you can operate on the contents as
appropriate.
In my mind, containers are primarily useful to run arbitrary
untrusted
third party applications, but of course they need a good enough
sandbox system for that. I hope such system will emerge from the
current work.
The above is a different "primarily useful" for some of us in research
computing, where we don't actually want operating system containment.
That's the job of the HPC resource manager, if anything.