Fedora bootc base images

Create and maintain base bootable container images from Fedora packages.

Motivation

The original Docker container model of using "layers" to model applications has been extremely successful. This project aims to apply the same technique for bootable host systems - using standard OCI/Docker containers as a transport and delivery format for base operating system updates.

Building images

The current default user experience is to build layered images on top of the official binary base images produced and tested by this project. See the documentation5 for more info.

You can build custom base images by forking this repository; however, https://gitlab.com/fedora/bootc/tracker/-/issues/32 tracks a more supportable mechanism that is not simply forking. For more information see6.

Build process

Building the images in this repo can be done with podman build, but note the build process uses a special podman-ecosystem specific mechanism to create fully custom images while inside a Containerfile. You need to enable some privileges as nested containerization is required.

podman build --security-opt=label=disable --cap-add=all \
  --device /dev/fuse -t localhost/fedora-bootc .

See the Containerfile for more details. This builds the default tier-1 image.

Fedora versions

By default, the base images are built for Fedora rawhide. To build against a different Fedora version, you can override the FROM image used to obtain the Fedora repos and dnf variables. E.g.:

podman build --from quay.io/fedora/fedora:41 ...

Deriving

You are of course also free to fork, customize, and build base images yourself. See this page6 of the documentation for more information.

Tiers

At the current time, there is just one reference base image published to the registry. Internally the content set is split up somewhat into "tiers", but this is an internal implementation detail and may change at any time.

It is planned to rework and improve this in the future, especially to support smaller custom images. For more on this, see this tracker issue.

• tier-1: This image is the default, what is published as https://quay.io/repository/fedora/fedora-bootc
• tier-0: This content set is more of a convenient centralization point for CI and curation around a package set that we can all agree is the rough minimum necessary for a usable system. It's not meant to be used as is, but layered upon.
• tier-x: This content set is the shared base used by all image-based Fedora variants (IoT, Atomic Desktops, and CoreOS). Changes to this tier may be done without accounting for external users. To build this, pass --build-arg=MANIFEST=fedora-tier-x.yaml to the build command above.

tier-1 inherits from tier-x and tier-x in turn inherit from tier-0.

All non-trivial changes to tier-0 and tier-x should be ACKed by at least one stakeholder of each Fedora variant WGs.

More information

Documentation: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/

Badges

Badge	Description	Service
	Dependencies	Renovate
	Static quality gates	pre-commit