Schedule FrOSCon 2025

Systemd's system extensions (sysexts) provide a mechanism to extend host's content while preserving the safety guarantees around updates. Some image based OS like Flatcar, Fedora CoreOS or Atomic Desktops are leveraging sysext images to provide container runtimes.

In this tutorial, Mathieu will give you the fundamentals of sysexts to help you building, running and updating your very first sysext images. From simple sysext-images like Containerd to more complex ones: learn how to securely extend image based systems.

On general purpose image based systems such as Flatcar and Bootable Containers, users are encouraged to run all their applications using containers. To make updates safe and predictable, the system is mounted as read only and local modifications are discouraged.

While containers offer a lot of flexibility on Linux, there are still cases where installing binaries or running applications directly on the host operating system is preferred.

As a trade-off, Systemd's system extensions (sysexts) provide a mechanism to extend host's content while preserving the safety guarentees around updates. Some image based OS like Flatcar, Fedora CoreOS or Atomic Desktops are leveraging sysext images to provide container runtimes.

In this tutorial, Mathieu will give you the fundamentals of sysexts to help you building, running and updating your very first sysext images. From simple sysext-images like Containerd to more complex ones: learn how to securely extend image based systems.

Info

Day: 2025-08-17
Start time: 16:00
Duration: 01:00
Room: Workshop (C115)
Track: System Administration
Language: en

Links:

• iCalendar
• Workshop repository