By cutting unnecessary processes, you can realize near-real-time container startup, critical in cars and other time-sensitive applications. By Dan Walsh (Red Hat), Alexander Larsson (Red Hat), Pierre-Yves Chibon (Red Hat).
One of the cornerstones of Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System (RHIVOS) is using systemd to manage the life cycle of containers created by Podman. During Podman’s development, as with most container engines, the speed requirements were mainly around pulling container images. The article then describes how authors achieved performance improvements:
- Satisfy the need for speed
- Catch the details
- Compile regular expressions with Go
- Drop virtual networks
- Use crun improvements
- Precompile seccomp
- Execute programs during initialization
- Work around kernel issues
- Use transient storage
Authors continue to work on finding and fixing performance issues in container startup in Podman. At this point, they have successfully improved it from around 2 seconds on the Raspberry Pi to under 0.3 seconds, providing a 6-fold increase in speed. Interesting read!
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