zlacker

[return to "Nitro: A tiny but flexible init system and process supervisor"]
1. andrew+Dj[view] [source] 2025-08-22 20:59:59
>>todsac+(OP)
I'm always torn when I see anything mentioning running an init system in a container. On one hand, I guess it's good that it's designed with that use case in mind. Mainly, though, I've just seen too many overly complicated things attempted (on greenfield even) inside a single container when they should have instead been designed for kubernetes/cloud/whatever-they-run-on directly and more properly decoupled.

It's probably just one of those "people are going to do it anyway" things. But I'm not sure if it's better to "do it better" and risk spreading the problem, or leave people with older solutions that fail harder.

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2. mikepu+Oo[view] [source] 2025-08-22 21:31:20
>>andrew+Dj
From my experience in the robotics space, a lot of containers start life as "this used to be a bare metal thing and then we moved it into a container", and with a lot of unstructured RPC going on between processes, there's little benefit in breaking up the processes into separate containers.

Supervisor, runit, systemd, even a tmux session are all popular options for how to run a bunch of stuff in a monolithic "app" container.

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3. palata+4t[view] [source] 2025-08-22 21:55:09
>>mikepu+Oo
My experience in the robotics space is that containers are a way to not know how to put a system together properly. It's the quick equivalent of "I install it on my Ubuntu, then I clone my whole system into a .iso and I call that a distribution". Most of the time distributed without any consideration for the open source licences being part of it.
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4. mikepu+Yx[view] [source] 2025-08-22 22:25:51
>>palata+4t
I've always advocated against containers as a means of deploying software to robots simply because to my mind it doesn't make sense— robots are full of bare-metal concerns, whether it's udev rules, device drivers, network config, special kernel or bootloader setup, never mind managing the container runtime itself including startup, updating, credentials, and all the rest of it. It's always felt to me like by the time you put in place mechanisms to handle all that crap outside the container, you might as well just be building a custom bare metal image and shipping that— have A/B partitions so you copy an update from the network to the other partition, use grub chainloading, wipe hands on pants.

The concern regarding license-adherence is orthogonal to all that but certainly valid. I think with the ROS ecosystem in particular there is a lot of "lol everything is BSD/Apache2 so we don't even have to think about it", without understanding that these licenses still have an attribution requirement.

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5. westur+6O[view] [source] 2025-08-23 00:18:27
>>mikepu+Yx
For workstations with GPUs and various kernel modules, rpm-ostree + GRUB + Native Containers for the rootfs and /usr and flatpaks etc on a different partition works well enough.

ostree+grub could be much better at handling failover like switches and rovers that then need disk space for at least two separate A/B flash slots and badblocks and a separate /root quota. ("support configuring host to retain more than two deployments" https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/577#issuecomment... )

Theoretically there's a disk space advantage to container layers.

Native Containers are bare-metal host images as OCI Images which can be stored in OCI Container Registries (or Artifact registries because packages too). GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, GCP, and AWS all host OCI Container/Artifact Registries.

From >>44401634 re bootc-image-builder and Native Containers and ublue-os/image-template, ublue-os/akmods, ublue-os/toolboxes w/ "quadlets and systemd" (and tini is already built-in to Docker and Podman) though ublue/bazzite has too many patches for a robot:

> ostree native containers are bootable host images that can also be built and signed with a SLSA provenance attestation; https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/container/

SBOM tools can scan hosts, VMs, and containers to identify software versions and licenses for citation and attribution. (CC-BY-SA requires Attribution if the derivative work is distributed. AGPL applies to hosted but not necessarily distributed derivative works. There's choosealicense.com , which has a table of open source license requirements in an Appendix: https://choosealicense.com/appendix/ )

BibTeX doesn't support schema.org/SoftwareApplication or subproperties of schema:identifier for e.g. the DOI URN of the primary schema.org/ScholarlyArticle and it's :funder(s).

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ROS on devices, ROS in development and simulation environments;

Conda-forge and RoboStack host ROS Robot Operating System as conda packages.

RoboStack/ros-noetic is ROS as conda packages: https://github.com/RoboStack/ros-noetic

gz-sim is the new version of gazebosim, a simulator for ROS development: https://github.com/conda-forge/gz-sim-feedstock

From >>44372666 :

> mujoco_menagerie has Mujoco MJCF XML models of various robots.

Mujoco ROS-compatibility: https://github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco/discussions/990

Moveit2: https://github.com/moveit/moveit2 :

> Combine Gazebo, ROS Control, and MoveIt for a powerful robotics development platform.

RoboStack has moveit2 as conda packages with clearly-indicated patches for Lin/Mac/Win: ros-noetic-moveit-ros-visualization.patch: https://github.com/RoboStack/ros-noetic/blob/main/patch/ros-...

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Devcontainer.json has been helpful for switching between projects lately.

devcontainer.json can reference a local container/image:name or a path to a ../Dockerfile. I personally prefer to build a named image with a Makefile, though vscode Remote Containers (devcontainers extension) can build from a Dockerfile and, if the devcontainer build succeeds, start code-server in the devcontainer and restart vscode as a client of the code-server running in the container so that all of the tools for developing the software can be reproducibly installed in a container isolated from the host system.

It looks like it's bootc or bootc-image-builder for building native container images?

bootc-image-builder: https://github.com/osbuild/bootc-image-builder

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