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toolbox/GOALS.md

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Toolbox logo landscape

Goals

High Level Goals

  • Provide a convenient command line interface to run containers using Podman
  • Support for development, debugging and system management use cases
  • Support for multiple distros
    • toolbox package in multiple distros
    • toolbox containers for multiple distros

Non-goals

  • Supporting multiple container runtimes. Toolbox will use Podman exclusively
  • Adding significant features on top of Podman
    • Significant feature requests should be driven into Podman upstream
  • To run containers that aren't tightly integrated with the host
    • Extremely sandboxed containers quickly become specific to the user

Developer Use Cases

  • I’m a developer hacking on source code and building/testing code
    • Most cases: user doesn't need root, rootless containers work fine
    • Some cases: user needs root for testing
  • Desktop Development:
    • Developers need things like D-Bus, display, etc. to be forwarded into the toolbox container
  • Headless Development:
    • Toolbox works properly in headless environments (no display, etc)
  • Need development tools like GDB, strace, etc. to work

Debugging and System Management Use Cases

  • Inspecting host processes and the kernel
    • Typically need root access
    • Need bpftrace, strace on host processes to work
      • Ideally even do things like helping get kernel-debuginfo data for the host kernel
  • Managing system services
    • systemctl restart foo.service
    • journalctl
  • Managing updates to the host
    • rpm-ostree
    • dnf/yum (classic systems)

Specific environments

  • Fedora Silverblue
    • Silverblue comes with a subset of packages and discourages host software changes
      • Users need a toolbox container as a working environment
      • Future: use toolbox container by default when a user opens a shell
  • Fedora CoreOS
    • Similar to Silverblue, but non-graphical and smaller package set
  • RHEL CoreOS
    • Similar to Fedora CoreOS. Based on RHEL content and the underlying operating system for OpenShift
    • Need to use default authfile on pull
    • Need to ensure compatibility with the rhel7/support-tools container
      • Currently not a toolbox image, opportunity for collaboration
    • Alignment with oc debug node/ (OpenShift)
      • oc debug node opens a shell on a kubernetes node
      • Value in having a consistent environment for both Toolbox's debugging mode and oc debug node