MikroTik Solutions

Changes To Container Limitations
Login

Changes To Container Limitations

Changes to "Container Limitations" between 2024-08-03 07:01:59 and 2024-08-05 13:25:26

32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40

41
42
43
44
45
46
47
32
33
34
35
36
37
38

39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47







-

+







*   hardware pass-thru:
    *   USB device entries under `/dev` are on the wish list, but not currently available.(^Not unless RouterOS itself sees the USB device, as with storage media, which you can bind-mount into the container with “`/container/add mounts=…`”.)
    *   There is no GPU support, not even for bare-metal x86 installs.

Lack of a management daemon(^`containerd` in modern setups, `dockerd` in old ones) is not in that list because a good bit of Docker’s competition also lacks this, on purpose. Between that and the other items on the list, the fairest comparison is not to fully-featured container *engines* like Docker and Podman but to the container *runner* at their heart:

* **runc**: 14 MiB(^This is the runner underpinning `containerd`, thus also Docker, although it precedes it. Long before they created `containerd`, it underpinned `dockerd` instead. Because it is so primordial, a good many other container engines are also based on it.)
* **crun**: 0.5 MiB(^This is Podman’s alternative to `runc`, written in C to make it smaller. Early versions of Podman once relied on `runc`, and it can still be configured to use it, but the new default is to use the slimmer but feature-equivalent `crun`.)
* **systemd-nspawn**: 1.3 MiB(^[This][sdnsp] is the bare-bones [OCI] image runner built into systemd, with a feature set fairly close to that of `container.npk`. The size above is for version 252 of this program’s parent [`systemd-container`][sdcnt] package as shipped on EL9.)
* **crun**: 0.5 MiB(^This is Podman’s alternative to `runc`, written in C to make it smaller. Early versions of Podman once relied on `runc`, and it can still be configured to use it, but the new default is to use the slimmer but feature-equivalent `crun`.)

One reason `container.npk` is far smaller than even the smallest of these runners is that the engines delegate much of what RouterOS lacks to the runner, so that even then it’s an unbalanced comparison. The [`kill`](#kill), [`ps`](#ps), and [`pause`](#pause) commands missing from `container.npk` are provided in Docker Engine way down at the `runc` level, not up at the top-level CLI.

With this grounding, let us dive into the details.

[caps]:   https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/capabilities.7.html
[CoW]:    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy-on-write