runk

runk

Overview

Warnings: runk is currently an experimental tool. Only continue if you are using a non-critical system.

runk is a standard OCI container runtime written in Rust based on a modified version of the Kata Container agent, kata-agent.

runk conforms to the OCI Container Runtime specifications.

Unlike the Kata Container runtime, kata-runtime, runk spawns and runs containers on the host machine directly. The user can run runk in the same way as the existing container runtimes such as runc, the most used implementation of the OCI runtime specs.

Why does runk exist?

The kata-agent is a process running inside a virtual machine (VM) as a supervisor for managing containers and processes running within those containers. In other words, the kata-agent is a kind of "low-level" container runtime inside VM because the agent spawns and runs containers according to the OCI runtime specs. However, the kata-agent does not have the OCI Command-Line Interface (CLI) that is defined in the runtime spec. The kata-runtime provides the CLI part of the Kata Containers runtime component, but the kata-runtime is a container runtime for creating hardware-virtualized containers running on the host.

runk is a Rust-based standard OCI container runtime that manages normal containers, not hardware-virtualized containers. runk aims to become one of the alternatives to existing OCI compliant container runtimes. The kata-agent has most of the features needed for the container runtime and delivers high performance with a low memory footprint owing to the implementation by Rust language. Therefore, runk leverages the mechanism of the kata-agent to avoid reinventing the wheel.

Performance

runk is faster than runc and has a lower memory footprint.

This table shows the average of the elapsed time and the memory footprint (maximum resident set size) for running sequentially 100 containers, the containers run /bin/true using run command with detached mode on 12 CPU cores (3.8 GHz AMD Ryzen 9 3900X) and 32 GiB of RAM. runk always runs containers with detached mode currently.

Evaluation Results:

	runk (v0.0.1)	runc (v1.0.3)	crun (v1.4.2)
time [ms]	39.83	50.39	38.41
memory footprint [MB]	4.013	10.78	1.738

Status of runk

We drafted the initial code here, and any contributions to runk and kata-agent are welcome.

Regarding features compared to runc, see the Status of runk section in the issue.

Building

You can build runk as follows.

$ cd runk
$ make

To install runk into default directory for install executable program (/usr/local/bin):

$ sudo make install

Using runk directly

Please note that runk is a low level tool not developed with an end user in mind. It is mostly employed by other higher-level container software like containerd.

If you still want to use runk directly, here's how.

Prerequisites

It is necessary to create an OCI bundle to use the tool. The simplest method is:

$ bundle_dir="bundle"
$ rootfs_dir="$bundle_dir/rootfs"
$ image="busybox"
$ mkdir -p "$rootfs_dir" && (cd "$bundle_dir" && runk spec)
$ sudo docker export $(sudo docker create "$image") | tar -C "$rootfs_dir" -xf -

Note: If you use the unmodified runk spec template, this should give a sh session inside the container. However, if you use runk directly and run a container with the unmodified template, runk cannot launch the sh session because runk does not support terminal handling yet. You need to edit the process field in the config.json should look like this below with "terminal": false and "args": ["sleep", "10"].

"process": {
    "terminal": false,
    "user": {
        "uid": 0,
        "gid": 0
    },
    "args": [
        "sleep",
        "10"
    ],
    "env": [
        "PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin",
        "TERM=xterm"
    ],
    "cwd": "/",
    [...]
}

If you want to launch the sh session inside the container, you need to run runk from containerd.

Please refer to the Using runk from containerd section

Running a container

Now you can go through the lifecycle operations in your shell. You need to run runk as root because runk does not have the rootless feature which is the ability to run containers without root privileges.

$ cd $bundle_dir

# Create a container
$ sudo runk create test

# View the container is created and in the "created" state
$ sudo runk state test

# Start the process inside the container
$ sudo runk start test

# After 10 seconds view that the container has exited and is now in the "stopped" state
$ sudo runk state test

# Now delete the container
$ sudo runk delete test

Using runk from Podman

runk can run containers using Podman.

First, install Podman from source code or package by following the Podman installation instructions.

Running a container with Podman command line

$ sudo podman --runtime /usr/local/bin/runk run -it --rm busybox sh
/ #

Note: runk does not support some commands except OCI standard operations yet, so those commands do not work in Podman. Regarding commands currently implemented in runk, see the Status of runk section.

Using runk from containerd

runk can run containers with the containerd runtime handler support on containerd.

Prerequisites for runk with containerd

• containerd v1.2.4 or above
• cri-tools

Note: cri-tools is a set of tools for CRI used for development and testing.

Install cri-tools from source code:

$ go get github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cri-tools
$ pushd $GOPATH/src/github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cri-tools
$ make
$ sudo -E make install
$ popd

Write the crictl configuration file:

$ cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/crictl.yaml
runtime-endpoint: unix:///run/containerd/containerd.sock
EOF

Configure containerd to use runk

Update /etc/containerd/config.toml:

$ cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/containerd/config.toml
version = 2
[plugins."io.containerd.runtime.v1.linux"]
  shim_debug = true
[plugins."io.containerd.grpc.v1.cri".containerd.runtimes.runc]
  runtime_type = "io.containerd.runc.v2"
[plugins."io.containerd.grpc.v1.cri".containerd.runtimes.runk]
  runtime_type = "io.containerd.runc.v2"
  [plugins."io.containerd.grpc.v1.cri".containerd.runtimes.runk.options]
    BinaryName = "/usr/local/bin/runk"
EOF

Restart containerd:

$ sudo systemctl restart containerd

Running a container with crictl command line

You can run containers in runk via containerd's CRI.

Pull the busybox image:

$ sudo crictl pull busybox

Create the sandbox configuration:

$ cat <<EOF | tee sandbox.json
{
    "metadata": {
        "name": "busybox-sandbox",
        "namespace": "default",
        "attempt": 1,
        "uid": "hdishd83djaidwnduwk28bcsb"
    },
    "log_directory": "/tmp",
    "linux": {
    }
}
EOF

Create the container configuration:

$ cat <<EOF | tee container.json
{
    "metadata": {
        "name": "busybox"
    },
    "image": {
        "image": "docker.io/busybox"
    },
    "command": [
        "sh"
    ],
    "envs": [
        {
            "key": "PATH",
            "value": "/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"
        },
        {
            "key": "TERM",
            "value": "xterm"
        }
    ],
    "log_path": "busybox.0.log",
    "stdin": true,
    "stdin_once": true,
    "tty": true
}
EOF

With the crictl command line of cri-tools, you can specify runtime class with -r or --runtime flag.

Launch a sandbox and container using the crictl:

# Run a container inside a sandbox
$ sudo crictl run -r runk container.json sandbox.json
f492eee753887ba3dfbba9022028975380739aba1269df431d097b73b23c3871

# Attach to the running container
$ sudo crictl attach --stdin --tty f492eee753887ba3dfbba9022028975380739aba1269df431d097b73b23c3871
/ #