Red Hat Rethinks the Linux Distro for the Container Age
Quoting: Red Hat Rethinks the Linux Distro for the Container Age —
Just as you use containers to quickly launch applications, Red Hat wants to make it just as easy to boot up entire Linux-based operating systems.
The company has made its flagship Linux distribution Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) bootable as a container image. In other words, all the operating code typically left out of a container, such as kernel-firmware, will be included in this image.
The company announced these initiatives during its annual user conference, Red Hat Summit, being held this week in Denver.
“This is something the entire industry needs,” explained Colin Waters, a Red Hat senior principal software engineer, in a session at the summit. “The more you’re using cloud native tooling, instead of building a unique bin for infrastructure, the [more] you’re leveraging that open source maintainership and shared ownership.”
The approach is different from the company’s typical package mode, where the final copy of a new RHEL release is issued as a stand-alone package to be installed on a server or virtual machine, which then is modified by the admin through customization for specific workloads.