On Mon, Sep 16, 2019, at 12:45 PM, Troy Dawson wrote:
> systemd-sysusers seeks to unify user creation[1]. It also has the
> benefit of being able to create users on bootup. But, it pulls in the
> entire systemd infrastructure with all it's dependencies.
> 
> containers do not need systemd to run. They are trying to be as small
> as possible. But if a package in container needs to add a user, then
> systemd is pulled in and that container grows by up to 60M.[2]
> 
> Minimizing containers, both in the short term and long term, are
> important to the minimization team.  We have opened an issue for
> this.[3]

As I said in the big thread, what we should aim to minimize is containers built 
via multi-stage build; nothing else is going to be small.

The user ID is a very interesting topic...bigger picture for example, OpenShift 
defaults to the `MustRunAsRange` SCC[1] - ensuring a uid is dynamically 
allocated for the container.  So the `useradd` and `sysusers` stuff isn't 
relevant.
(We have a longstanding issue though that the uid isn't in the passwd database 
but I think podman is growing some code to fix that)

For non-Kubernetes systems (e.g. installing RPMs on a host) - I think in a lot 
of cases, using systemd dynamic users is best:
http://0pointer.net/blog/dynamic-users-with-systemd.html
Where possible - using it for e.g. postgres would probably be somewhat of a 
surprise for admins.

It'd be useful in this discussion to look at particular containers - I'm 
guessing it's things like nginx and postgres where we want to ship both an RPM 
and a container image?   And where things intersect here is whether or not the 
RPM depends on systemd.  Maybe the least bad thing is to introduce a 
`systemd-container-stub` package that is empty except for Provides?   
Dunno...it's messy.

A whole lot of service software is container-only - it doesn't make sense to 
make RPMs for them, which sidesteps a lot of this.

[1] 
https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/3.11/architecture/additional_concepts/authorization.html#security-context-constraints
_______________________________________________
devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org
Fedora Code of Conduct: 
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
List Archives: 
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org

Reply via email to