Base fedora image for constructing containers

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I am in the process of setting up for bootc experiments. Taking to heart the value of fedora software supply chain trust I see an opportunity to learn podman better by constructing a fedora based registry container.

docker-distribution is in fedora yum repos for f40. So I was thinking that I could start with a base fedora container image and layer on docker-distribution as an instructive test. Looking for what base images of fedora were built within the fedora project I found a couple candidates. I also pulled the official container image from the upstream project.

podman images
REPOSITORY                     TAG         IMAGE ID      CREATED       SIZE
quay.io/fedora/fedora          40-x86_64   1404c219d44f  10 hours ago  233 MB
quay.io/fedora/fedora-minimal  40-x86_64   374e12affd8d  10 hours ago  122 MB
docker.io/library/registry     2           d6b2c32a0f14  8 months ago  26 MB

Now I am willing to use the CNCF docker.io/library/registry image as I consider them to also be trustworthy with software supply chain. But it is an awfully large difference in image size. The CNCF image is based on alpinelinux.

Are there smaller fedora base images available?

Alternatively what techniques are there to reduce the size of the deployable container?

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The Fedora images are rather large relatively speaking. Some of that is using glibc instead of the minimalist musl replacement. But it’s also a bunch of cross-dependencies for core packages that is hard to untangle. This isn’t necessarily as bad as it seems, because in many practical deployments you’ll end up needing a lot of them anyway across different applications.

We did have an initiative around minimizing the set a few years ago — see Fedora Minimization Objective :: Fedora Docs.

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A post was split to a new topic: Proposal for shared layers for bootc systems (future CoreOS, Silverblue, Kinoite, IoT, etc)

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As you can see above, I’ve moved my proposal here to a Project Discussion topic, where it’s really more useful.

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are you trying to build on the existing fedora bootc images?

You may find Base images :: Fedora Docs interesting. Fedoras bootc base image is quay.io/fedora/fedora-bootc:40

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We’re discussing this in Supportable customizable base images (#32) · Issues · fedora / bootc / Issue Tracker · GitLab

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