Red Hat Strips Down For Docker

angry tapir writes Reacting to the surging popularity of the Docker virtualization technology, Red Hat has customized a version of its Linux distribution to run Docker containers. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host strips away all the utilities residing in the stock distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that aren't needed to run Docker containers. Removing unneeded components saves on storage space, and reduces the time needed for updating and booting up. It also provides fewer potential entry points for attackers. (Product page is here.)

Comments

Re:Systemd is tearing apart the Linux community.

[Anonymous Coward]

"warring factions"

No. Every major distro has moved to Systemd. There's no war -- Systemd won, because distro developers (you know, people who actually know their stuff) have chosen to use it. All that's left is a few crybabies on Slashdot who constantly report how they're moving 50,000 servers over to OpenBSD, but never actually do it.

There's no war here -- just a few sad losers. Try going outside or something.

Re:define terms in article summary

[Tom]

I'd be interested to see which distro can get their image down to the smallest (functional) size.

LFS, of course. Or any other non-distro approach. What do you need a distro for if all you want is the kernel and basic system functions? It's not so difficult to start with zero and get to a shell prompt. Been there, done that.

The really interesting approach would be to have a deployment distro - a way to add packages to such an image from outside, without having all the packaging crap and its dependencies on the image itself.

I think what you really want is a build system that can install to the image.