9 ms·

Isn't this just docker with extra steps?

• soupbowl 10mo ago
  This is more like making an immutable linux container using only OS base tools. Docker is a whole stack doing the work for you.
  • fukka42 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • miladyincontrol 10mo ago
    I have to imagine systemd’s nspawn with btrfs integration took much inspiration. Combined with systemd’s service configuration it really makes a wonderful way of running distroless, immutable containers.
    • arminiusreturns 10mo ago
      I second systemd-nspawn being a hidden gem for this usecase. I use git post-recieve hooks that target it for much of my ci/cd pipelines. I also find myself using nspawn just to isolate apps like firefox, etc.
• ssl-3 10mo ago
  No. ZFS has been stable in FreeBSD for something like 17 years, and FreeBSD jails have been around for something like 25 years. By the time Docker hit 1.0 (about 11 years ago), the use of snapshots and jails had already been normal parts of life in the FreeBSD space for over half of a decade.
  • IgorPartola 10mo ago
    I never find arguments like this compelling (but I agree with your sentiment). I don’t much care to fire up the time machine to go back 12 or more years to develop software today. If your argument is that ZFS and jails provide the same functionality but are more stable than Docker. But as is it comes off as “get off my lawn you young whipper snappers”. But at the same time, the reason Docker won was not because it was groundbreaking tech or because it was amazingly well tested or anything. Just as one example, it has a years old bug which actively gets more comments every week having to do with Docker grossly mishandling quotes in env files. No, the reason it won is because the development experience and the deploy experience is easy, especially when you are on Linux AND on macOS. I can’t run FreeBSD jails or ZFS on macOS, can I? Definitely not with one file and one command. Jails and ZFS are amazing tech but they are not accessible. Docker made simple things very simple while being cross-platform enough. Do I feel gross using it? Yeah. It’s a kludgy solution to the problem. But it gets the job done and is supported by every provider out there. I am excited that it is being ported to FreeBSD though I know it will be a very long process.
    • atmosx 10mo ago
      MacOS runs containers spinning VMs. That’s why it’s slow (processing and filesystem I/O) compared to Linux. Same thing could be done in FreeBSD. Someone needs to put in the work…
    • stingraycharles 10mo ago
      Yeah I would love to use FreeBSD jails with ZFS and everything, it’s just that the whole cloud and containerization thing happened based on Linux and FreeBSD just never made it into that ecosystem. You’ll be sacrificing a lot and have to hand-roll a lot if you want your organization to switch from Linux+docker to FreeBSD+jails
      • jonhohle 10mo ago
        What about FreeBSD+OCI containers https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/oci-containers-on-freebsd/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/oci-containers-on-freebsd...
        • nesarkvechnep 10mo ago
          In my opinion this is the path forward. I can already imagine Hashicorp Nomad orchestrator, with the podman driver, running fleets of FreeBSD containers.
      • randmeerkat 10mo ago
        Hacker News serves +4M requests per day using nothing but two FreeBSD servers…
        • delian66 10mo ago
          4M requests/day is ~46 requests/second , for content, that could be cached a lot. Even if you have spikes that are 100x bigger than the average, that would be 4600r/s which does not seem like much in 2025.
      • kbenson 10mo ago
  • fukka42 10mo ago
    [dead]
• righthand 10mo ago
  This is like using Lxc with fewer steps and less tape. FreeBsd has jail managers aka container managers aka “Docker” as well.
  • righthand 10mo ago
    Try Bastille FreeBSD!