Kata Containers

Welcome to Kata Containers!

This repository is the home of the Kata Containers code for the 2.0 and newer releases.

If you want to learn about Kata Containers, visit the main Kata Containers website.

Introduction

Kata Containers is an open source project and community working to build a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs.

License

The code is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. See the license file for further details.

Platform support

Kata Containers currently runs on 64-bit systems supporting the following technologies:

Architecture	Virtualization technology
x86_64, amd64	Intel VT-x, AMD SVM
aarch64 ("arm64")	ARM Hyp
ppc64le	IBM Power
s390x	IBM Z & LinuxONE SIE

Hardware requirements

The Kata Containers runtime provides a command to determine if your host system is capable of running and creating a Kata Container:

$ kata-runtime check

Notes:

• This command runs a number of checks including connecting to the network to determine if a newer release of Kata Containers is available on GitHub. If you do not wish this to check to run, add the --no-network-checks option.

• By default, only a brief success / failure message is printed. If more details are needed, the --verbose flag can be used to display the list of all the checks performed.

• If the command is run as the root user additional checks are run (including checking if another incompatible hypervisor is running). When running as root, network checks are automatically disabled.

Getting started

See the installation documentation.

Documentation

See the official documentation including:

• Installation guides
• Developer guide
• Design documents
  • Architecture overview
  • Architecture 3.0 overview

Configuration

Kata Containers uses a single configuration file which contains a number of sections for various parts of the Kata Containers system including the runtime, the agent and the hypervisor.

Hypervisors

See the hypervisors document and the Hypervisor specific configuration details.

Community

To learn more about the project, its community and governance, see the community repository. This is the first place to go if you wish to contribute to the project.

Getting help

See the community section for ways to contact us.

Raising issues

Please raise an issue in this repository.

Note: If you are reporting a security issue, please follow the vulnerability reporting process

Developers

See the developer guide.

Components

Main components

The table below lists the core parts of the project:

Component	Type	Description
runtime	core	Main component run by a container manager and providing a containerd shimv2 runtime implementation.
runtime-rs	core	The Rust version runtime.
agent	core	Management process running inside the virtual machine / POD that sets up the container environment.
libraries	core	Library crates shared by multiple Kata Container components or published to crates.io
dragonball	core	An optional built-in VMM brings out-of-the-box Kata Containers experience with optimizations on container workloads
documentation	documentation	Documentation common to all components (such as design and install documentation).
libraries	core	Library crates shared by multiple Kata Container components or published to crates.io
tests	tests	Excludes unit tests which live with the main code.

Additional components

The table below lists the remaining parts of the project:

Component	Type	Description
packaging	infrastructure	Scripts and metadata for producing packaged binaries (components, hypervisors, kernel and rootfs).
kernel	kernel	Linux kernel used by the hypervisor to boot the guest image. Patches are stored here.
osbuilder	infrastructure	Tool to create "mini O/S" rootfs and initrd images and kernel for the hypervisor.
agent-ctl	utility	Tool that provides low-level access for testing the agent.
trace-forwarder	utility	Agent tracing helper.
runk	utility	Standard OCI container runtime based on the agent.
ci	CI	Continuous Integration configuration files and scripts.
katacontainers.io	Source for the katacontainers.io site.

Packaging and releases

Kata Containers is now available natively for most distributions. However, packaging scripts and metadata are still used to generate snap and GitHub releases. See the components section for further details.

Glossary of Terms

See the glossary of terms related to Kata Containers.