Richard Bucker

LCX or Docker

Posted at — Feb 24, 2023

I’m a bit of a techno snob. I have my opinions and I like them for the most part. Sometimes I get my gears all wired up and I have to change my opinion. So what about Docker and LCX.

Well, let’s start with VMs. One author put it well enough… Unless you’re a mega corp you’re not going to be able to afford the kind of hardware required to get VMs in a useful state, Certainly not desktop tower of going to host the amount of RAM or CPU required.

That author was trying to make a case for containers. And maybe there is. In the container use-case the host system shares all the resources between the containers. For the most part it’s sort of elastic to the max available on the host. There are some quirks like Docker where it only stores the delta changes of the file system. That might be good for some cases but I found that the host DISK is consumed quickly on active systems and terrible for databases. LXC, on the otherhand supports different filesystems but requires some detail understanding of the configuration.

In summary; LXC is complicated. Docker is simple. Docker is unreliable and LXC is complicated. Docker is mainstream and LXC has poor documentation.

I think I prefer things like chroot and jail. There are also some interesting features like unveil and pledge in OpenBSD. Chroot and jail only let you impersonate the host OS in a target filesystem. That’s not entirely bad compaired to containers that let you host a multitude of target linux distros and releases.

The challenge is that we all need a reliable desktop where we can do the work we need to do safely. That crashes are just a mild speedbunp and that in most cases we are up and running again in minutes or 10s of minutes. I have some documentation there I can deploy a new Chromebook container in 30 minutes and continue working for my employer. The problem is it’s still 30 minutes. Most of which is the network security model and dual authentication. The best new is that 30 minutes is the same whether it’s a ChromeOS, OSX, BSD, or Linux.

The conclusion… Chromebook is still the ideal platform even though I’m not using it for the purpose.