I suspect they meant it runs natively in that it’s an aarch64 binary. It’s still running a VM under the hood because docker is really just a nice frontend to a bunch of Linux kernel features.

[–] Dohnakun@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

docker is really just a nice frontend to a bunch of Linux kernel features.

What does it do anyway? I know there's lxc in the kernel and Docker not using it, doing it's own thing, but not much else.

[–] declination@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago

I can't remember exactly what all the pieces are. However, I believe its a combination of

cgroups: process isolation which is why you can see docker processes in ps/top/etc but you can't for vms. I believe this is also what gets you the ability to run cross distro images since the isolation ensures the correct shared objects are loaded
network namespaces: how they handle generating the isolated network stack per process
some additional mount magic that I don't know what its called.

My understanding is that all of the neat properties of docker are actuall part of the kernel, docker (and podman and other container runtimes) are mostly just packing them together to achieve the desired properties of "containers".

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (5 replies)